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      Trump Argues That Courts Cannot Block Musk’s Team From Treasury Systems

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      Lawyers for the Trump administration argued late Sunday that a court order blocking Elon Musk’s aides from entering the Treasury Department’s payment and data systems impinged on the president’s absolute powers over the executive branch, which they argued the courts could not usurp.The filing by the administration came in response to a lawsuit filed Friday night by 19 attorneys general, led by New York’s Letitia James, who had won a temporary pause on Saturday. The lawsuit said the Trump administration’s policy of allowing appointees and “special government employees” access to these systems, which contain sensitive information such as bank details and social security numbers, was unlawful.Members of Mr. Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency, which is not actually a department, have been combing through the databases to find expenditures to cut. The lawsuit says the initiative challenges the Constitution’s separation of powers, under which Congress determines government spending.A U.S. district judge in Manhattan, Paul A. Engelmayer, on Saturday ordered any such officials who had been granted access to the systems since Jan. 20 to “destroy any and all copies of material downloaded from the Treasury Department’s records and systems.”Judge Engelmayer said in an emergency order that the officials’ access heightened the risk of leaks and of the systems becoming more vulnerable than before to hacking. He set a hearing in the case for Friday.Federal lawyers defending Mr. Trump — as well as the Treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, and the Treasury Department — called the order “markedly overboard” and said the court should dismiss the injunction, or at least modify his order.They argued that the order violated the Constitution by ignoring the separation of powers and severing the executive branch’s right to appoint its own employees. The restriction, they wrote, “draws an impermissible and anti-constitutional distinction” between civil servants and political appointees working in the Treasury Department.The filing followed warning shots over the weekend. Vice President JD Vance declared that the courts and judges aren’t allowed “to control the executive’s legitimate power,” although American courts have long engaged in the practice of judicial review.On Saturday, Mr. Trump called the ruling by Judge Engelmayer a “disgrace” and said that “No judge should, frankly, be allowed to make that kind of a decision.”This is a developing story and will be updated. More

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      Springfield, Ohio, Sues Neo-Nazi Group, Saying It Intimidated Haitians

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      In the lawsuit, the city states that people associated with the group made death threats last year against those who expressed support for Haitian residents.The city of Springfield, Ohio, which was singled out by Donald J. Trump and JD Vance during the presidential campaign with false and outrageous claims about Haitian immigrants, has sued a neo-Nazi group that helped draw national attention to the small city in the first place.The suit, filed in federal court on Thursday, was brought by the mayor, Rob Rue, along with several city commissioners and Springfield residents. It says that Blood Tribe, a four-year-old neo-Nazi group, began a campaign of intimidation focused on Haitian immigrants in the city. It culminated last summer in “a torrent of hateful conduct, including acts of harassment, bomb threats and death threats” against locals who spoke in support of the Haitian residents.The plaintiffs cite the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871, which makes it a crime to deny individuals their civil rights, and accuses Blood Tribe of ethnic intimidation and inciting violence. With the legal support of the Anti-Defamation League, the plaintiffs are seeking punitive damages and compensation for the thousands of dollars spent on extra security as Blood Tribe’s campaign unfolded.The suit does not mention Mr. Trump, who falsely claimed at a presidential debate in September that Haitian immigrants in Springfield were eating dogs and cats, nor Mr. Vance, who urged his “fellow patriots” to “keep the cat memes flowing.” But the suit says that Christopher Pohlhaus, the leader of Blood Tribe, “gleefully took credit for the growing notoriety” of the false claims about Haitians in the city, “bragging on social media that the Blood Tribe had ‘pushed Springfield into the public consciousness.’”The suit did not name a lawyer for Mr. Pohlhaus, who could not be reached for comment.In recent years, between 10,000 and 20,000 Haitians had come to Springfield, a city of about 60,000 in southwestern Ohio, attracted by the substantial labor needs of the warehouses and manufacturing businesses in the area. While “the vast majority” of the Haitians are in the country lawfully and were “welcomed” by the city, the suit says, the arrival of so many newcomers in such a short time brought a range of challenges, putting serious demand on local hospitals, schools and housing.In posts on its social media accounts last July, Blood Tribe called the arrival of large numbers of Haitians an “act of demographic warfare,” that had “caused a significant strain on the good White residents of the city.” The suit charges that Blood Tribe members, who were masked, armed and brandishing swastikas, gathered at a local jazz festival and later outside the mayor’s home. It adds that the group spread the personal information of people who supported the Haitian community, in some cases putting home addresses on websites that drew men looking for drugs or sex.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Trump Offers Confusing Clues on Syria

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      The president-elect faces hard choices about the country’s post-Assad future. His vows not to get involved might be hard to keep.President-elect Donald J. Trump will inherit a dangerous new Middle East crisis in Syria when he assumes office in January. But how he might approach a nation now controlled by rebels with terrorist roots is unclear, and may be decided by fierce competing arguments among advisers and foreign leaders in the months to come.There are many good reasons to expect Mr. Trump to take a hands-off approach to Syria, which erupted into civil war in 2011. One is Mr. Trump’s apparent disdain for the country, which he has branded a land of “sand and death.”Mr. Trump has also long railed against broader U.S. efforts to reshape former Middle East dictatorships such as Iraq and Libya, in what he calls America’s “endless wars.” As rebels entered Damascus, Syria’s capital, over the weekend, Mr. Trump posted on social media that the country was “a mess” and that the United States “should have nothing to do with it.”“This is not our fight. Let it play out. Do not get involved,” Mr. Trump wrote, in all capital letters.The sentiment was echoed on social media by Vice President-elect JD Vance, a fervent critic of American foreign policy overreach.Mr. Trump plans to nominate Tulsi Gabbard, a former Democratic congresswoman, as his director of national intelligence. She has spent years arguing that the United States has no business getting involved in Syria’s long-running civil war.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      JD Vance, Elon Musk and the Future of America

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      Beneath all the furor around Donald Trump’s appointments — Matt Gaetz down and out, Pete Hegseth down but maybe coming back, the Kash Patel drama waiting the wings — the most important figures in this administration’s orbit have not changed since Election Day: Besides the president himself, the future of Trumpism is still most likely to be shaped and stamped by two men, JD Vance and Elon Musk.Not just because of their talent and achievements, and not just because Vance is the political heir apparent and Musk would be one of the world’s most influential men even if he didn’t have the ear of the president-elect. It’s also because they represent, more clearly than any other appointee, two potent visions for a 21st century right, and their interaction is likely to shape conservatism for the next four years and beyond.Musk is the dynamist, the believer in growth and innovation and exploration as the lodestars of American civilization. His dynamism was not always especially ideological: The Tesla and SpaceX mogul was once a Barack Obama Democrat, happy to support an active and sometimes spendthrift government so long as it spent freely on his projects. But as Musk has moved right, he has adopted a more libertarian pose, insisting on the profound wastefulness of government spending and the tyranny of the administrative state.Vance meanwhile is the populist, committed to protect and uplift those parts of America neglected or left behind in an age of globalization. Along with his support for the Trumpian causes of tariffs and immigration restriction, this worldview has made him more sympathetic than the average Republican senator to certain forms of government investment — from longstanding programs like Social Security to new ideas about industrial policy and family policy.Despite this contrast, the Musk and Vance worldviews overlap in important ways. Musk has moved in a populist direction on immigration, while Vance has been a venture capitalist and clearly has a strong sympathy for parts of the dynamist worldview, especially its critique of the regulatory state. Both men share a farsighted interest in the collapsing birthrate, a heretofore-fringe issue that’s likely to dominate the later parts of the 21st century. And there is modest-but-real convergence between the Muskian “tech” worldview and Vance’s more “neo-trad” style of religious conservatism, based on not just a shared antipathy toward wokeness but also similar views about the intelligibility of the cosmos and the providential place of humankind in history.So you can imagine a scenario, in Trump’s second term and beyond, where these convergences yield a dynamist-populist fusionism — a conservatism that manages to simultaneously aim for the stars and uplift and protect the working class, in which economic growth and technological progress help renew the heartland (as Musk’s own companies have brought jobs and optimism to South Texas) while also preserving our creaking social compact.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Trump Donors Who Give at Least $1 Million or Raise $2 Million Get Inaugural Access

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      President-elect Donald J. Trump is raising money for his inauguration in increments as high as $2 million, according to materials from fund-raisers for the inauguration.A flier titled “Trump Vance Inaugural Committee Benefits” lists the perks of donating $1 million or raising $2 million for the event. Donors who reach that elite level receive as many as a half-dozen tickets to eight inaugural events from Jan. 17 to Jan. 20.After a divisive election, donors and corporations typically put big money into presidents’ inaugural committees as a way to support the president and also to curry favor with an administration that will be in power for four years. There are no limits on the donations that can be made to the Trump committee, which is structured as a political nonprofit for tax purposes, but gifts over $200 are disclosed to the Federal Election Commission.Highlights of the schedule of events for the elite donors and fund-raisers include a reception with cabinet picks and a dinner with Vice President-elect JD Vance and his wife, Usha Vance, on Jan. 18, and an “elegant and intimate dinner with President Donald J. Trump and Mrs. Melania Trump” on Jan. 19, described as “the pinnacle event.” Before the dissemination of this flier, Mrs. Trump had not confirmed her plans to attend the inaugural festivities, which include a Sunday morning interfaith service that the materials say she plans to attend with Mr. Trump.On Monday, Jan. 20, the big donors will receive six tickets each to attend the inauguration itself.Mr. Trump’s first inaugural committee, which was investigated by federal prosecutors for illegal foreign donations and resulted in a 12-year prison sentence for one donor, raised $107 million in 2016 and 2017. The current inaugural committee is being led by Steven Witkoff, a billionaire real estate mogul who has given nearly $2 million to Mr. Trump’s political causes over the past decade and who has been named a special envoy to the Middle East, and Kelly Loeffler, a former Republican senator from Georgia.Mr. Trump is continuing to raise money for his political efforts, too. On Dec. 19, he is expected to headline an event at his private Florida club, Mar-a-Lago, for a pro-Trump super PAC, MAGA Inc., where tickets cost $1 million a person, according to a copy of the invitation seen by The New York Times. More

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      Barstool Conservatism, Revisited

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      Despite Donald Trump’s defeat in the 2020 presidential election, his political coalition was already expanding in consequential ways. Not only did he make notable gains among Hispanic and African-American voters — gains that only increased this year — but he also attracted the support of a loose grouping of mostly young, male voters whom I described around that time as “Barstool conservatives.” This year, as I had predicted, they appeared to swing hard for Mr. Trump.“Barstool conservatism” was a reference to the media company Barstool Sports and its founder, Dave Portnoy, who became a folk hero of sorts in 2020 after raising millions of dollars on behalf of bars and restaurants whose existence had been threatened by Covid lockdowns. Apart from Mr. Portnoy, Barstool conservatism’s most representative figures today are the podcast host Joe Rogan, the retired N.F.L. punter turned ESPN personality Pat McAfee and various mixed martial arts fighters.Barstool conservatism is libertarian in the sense that it values autonomy and ambition but not doctrinaire about it in a way that would be recognizable to, say, the editors of Reason magazine. It is a world of fantasy football podcasts, betting apps, diet trends (keto, paleo, carnivore) and more nebulous “lifestyle” questions about the nuances of alcohol and cannabis use. The outlook is culturally rather than socially conservative, skeptical of racial and gender politics for reasons that have more to do with the stridency of their proponents than with any deep-seated convictions about the issues themselves.As a social conservative with an antipathy to libertarianism in all its forms, I viewed the rise of Barstool conservatism in 2020 with foreboding. And rightly so. This year Mr. Trump ran what was, in effect, a pro-choice campaign. He signaled support for legalized cannabis but not for a traditional conception of marriage. He may have selected JD Vance as his running mate, but otherwise he took social conservatives for granted. Barstool conservatives had the upper hand throughout the campaign, as underscored by the emphasis Mr. Trump’s team placed on Mr. Rogan’s endorsement.I have long been inclined to make certain hard and fast distinctions between Barstool conservatism and Trumpism of the sort that Mr. Vance represents, which I associate with opposition to abortion, pornography and cannabis, and support for traditional families, shoring up the power of organized labor and protecting religious freedom. In theory these two conservative tendencies are diametrically opposed. Until recently I would have suggested that only Mr. Trump could possibly unite them, by sheer force of personality.But since this year’s election I have been on an informal listening tour of young men in the part of rural Michigan where I live, which is a nice way of saying that I have spent a lot of time talking to people in bars. What I heard from mechanics, waiters, high school teachers and others often surprised me. The future of American conservatism now strikes me as more complex and less ideologically predictable — and less dependent on Mr. Trump — than I had thought.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      China’s Hacking Reached Deep Into U.S. Telecoms

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      The chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee said hackers listened to phone calls and read texts by exploiting aging equipment and seams in the networks that connect systems.China’s recent breach of the innermost workings of the U.S. telecommunications system reached far deeper than the Biden administration has described, the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee said on Thursday, with hackers able to listen in on telephone conversations and read text messages.“The barn door is still wide open, or mostly open,” the Democratic chairman, Senator Mark Warner of Virginia, a former telecommunications executive, said in an interview on Thursday.Mr. Warner said he had been stunned by the scope and depth of the breach, which was engineered over the past year by a group linked to Chinese intelligence that has been named Salt Typhoon by Microsoft, whose cybersecurity team discovered the hack in the summer. Government officials have been struggling to understand what China obtained and how it might have been able to monitor conversations held by a number of well-connected Americans, including President-elect Donald J. Trump and Vice President-elect JD Vance.At first, the F.B.I. and other investigators believed that China’s hackers used stolen passwords to focus mostly on the system that taps telephone conversations and texts under court orders. It is administered by a number of the nation’s telecommunications firms, including the three largest — Verizon, AT&T and T-Mobile. But in recent days, investigators have discovered how deeply China’s hackers had moved throughout the country by exploiting aging equipment and seams in the networks connecting disparate systems.U.S. officials said that since the hack was exposed, the Chinese intruders had seemingly disappeared, suspending their intrusion so their full activity could not be discovered. But Mr. Warner said it would be wrong to conclude that the Chinese had been ousted from the nation’s telecommunications system, or that investigators even understood how deeply they were embedded.“We’ve not found everywhere they are,” Mr. Warner said.The committee has received briefings from the government on the hack, and Mr. Warner has had conversations with telecommunications executives.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Blinken Visits NATO Headquarters

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      The U.S. secretary of state met with European allies rattled by the American election results at a critical moment for Ukraine and the alliance.Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken visited NATO headquarters in Brussels on Wednesday at what he called a “critical moment” for Ukraine and the U.S.-led military alliance, as Europe braces for the anticipated upheaval of a new Trump era in Washington.In a trip organized only after last week’s presidential election results made clear that U.S. policy will likely swing dramatically away from President Biden’s lock step support for NATO and Ukraine, Mr. Blinken met with alliance and European officials to help plan for a post-Biden future.Donald J. Trump’s return to the White House in January has deeply shaken Europe’s mainstream political leaders, thanks to his skepticism about the value of NATO, the cost of defending Ukraine, and the wisdom of isolating Russia and its president, Vladimir V. Putin.Once in office, Mr. Trump could move quickly to change U.S. policy on all three fronts — a shift that European leaders fear might leave their countries both less secure from Russian aggression and at an economic disadvantage.Mr. Blinken did not explicitly mention Mr. Trump or last week’s election in his public remarks after meetings at NATO headquarters. But an American leadership change with huge global import was the obvious subtext, as Mr. Blinken stressed the intrinsic value of the alliance.Ukraine’s foreign minister, Andrii Sybiha, addressed the elephant in the room before sitting down with Mr. Blinken at a Brussels hotel. He said that their meeting offered “an opportunity to coordinate steps” after the U.S. election, noting that Ukraine’s government was speaking “both with the president-elect and his team and also with the outgoing administration.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More