Today's recap
Donald Trump’s transition to the White House continues apace. Trump’s nominee to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, Robert F Kennedy Jr, has been meeting with senators to make the case for his appointment.
At a wide-ranging press conference from his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida, Trump tried to downplay concerns that his administration (under Kennedy’s influence) to remove the polio vaccine from circulation.
Here’s what else happened today:
Trump suggested he might pardon New York mayor Eric Adams.
He announced that Japanese firm SoftBank would invest $100bn in America and create 100,000 jobs, though in the past, similar promises have not panned out.
TikTok asked the supreme court to block a law that aims to ban the popular social media app in the US. The company asked the Supreme Court to act by 6 January.
Democrats float a plan for Kamala Harris to run for president again in 2028. Harris has reportedly not ruled out a second run, but is also said to be considering a bid for the governor of California.
Democrats are making a last-minute push to convince Joe Biden to put the Equal Rights Amendment into the constitution, which would protect against sex discrimination and likely spark a court fight.
Lindsey Graham, a Republican senator who has met with Pete Hegseth, said the defense secretary nominee told him that he will allow a woman who he paid in relation to a sexual assault allegation to speak about it publicly.
Biden defended his economic record with an essay in the progressive American Prospect magazine.
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Senator Rick Scott, a Republican from Florida, is backing Robert F Kennedy Jr for secretary of health and human services. The senator said he met with Kennedy on Monday and they had a “great meeting”. This comes as Kennedy is courting votes from lawmakers for his confirmation.
“I really appreciate his message,” Scott said during a press conference following the meeting. He mentioned that he himself used to work in the hospital business.
“Finally, we’re going to have a HHS secretary that wakes up every day and says, ‘How do we keep everybody healthy in this country?’” Scott said.
Scott said he believes in vaccines and that Kennedy said what he wants with vaccines is “transparency”. Scott added that they did not discuss polio vaccines or abortion. Kennedy has shown support for abortion rights.
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Democrats eye Harris 2028 presidential run as they devise political comeback
Democratic party aides have begun to float ideas for a Kamala Harris political comeback, reportedly eyeing another run at the US’s highest office even as the party continues to grapple with the electoral messages contained in the vice-president’s decisive defeat in November’s White House race against Donald Trump.
Harris, who has reportedly not ruled out a second run for the presidency, is now reported to be considering a run for the California governorship, currently held until 2027 by Gavin Newsom. Newsom was a rumoured presidential contender during the chaotic summer that saw Joe Biden step down from a rematch with Trump – whom he defeated in the 2020 election – and then endorse Harris as his replacement.
According to the Washington Post on Monday, some Democratic party aides believe Trump – who, among other things, overcame a criminal conviction and other such charges to win – has sufficiently overturned the norms of losing White House candidates’ not attempting a second bite at the proverbial apple to give Harris the opportunity of a repeat bid in 2028, this time for the full cycle.
“Since Donald Trump has rewritten the rules – the norms – I don’t believe Kamala Harris or anyone should try to go with precedent, ever,” said Donna Brazile, a Harris ally, Al Gore 2000 presidential campaign manager and political commentator. “There are no rule books.”
Read more:
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Trump’s stance on TikTok has softened since his first term in office. Initially he advocated to ban the app, but during his run for re-election he posted on his Truth Social account that he would “save TikTok in America”.
Trump launched his own TikTok account in June, which now has nearly 15 million followers.
On Monday, Trump said in a press conference at Mar-a-Lago that he has a “warm spot in my heart for TikTok”. He’s reportedly slated to meet with TikTok CEO Shou Chew at his estate on Monday, according to CNN’s Kaitlan Collins.
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TikTok asked the supreme court to block a law that aims to ban the popular social media app in the US. Unless the court intervenes, the ban is set to go into effect on 19 January, one day before Donald Trump is sworn into office.
The law to ban TikTok passed Congress last spring and was signed by Joe Biden. The US government says TikTok is a national security threat because its parent company, ByteDance, is Chinese-owned. They say China could use the app to access personal data from millions of Americans and also spread propaganda. The government has not disclosed evidence that Beijing or ByteDance has done so.
TikTok argues the law is unconstitutional, unfairly singles it out and violates the right to free speech of its millions of users.
“The Act will shutter one of America’s most popular speech platforms the day before a presidential inauguration,” reads the court filing. “This, in turn, will silence the speech of Applicants and the many Americans who use the platform to communicate about politics, commerce, arts, and other matters of public concern,” they added.
TikTok asked the supreme court to act by 6 January.
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Donald Trump’s allies have become increasingly emboldened to float their most audacious ideas as Trump prepares to return to office, suggesting he run for an unconstitutional third term in 2028 and accusing the news media of having engaged in a criminal conspiracy with prosecutors against him.
Those suggestions, by Trump’s former strategist Steve Bannon, came at a self-congratulatory gala dinner for conservatives in New York on Sunday. At times the remarks seemed like the product of the euphoria that permeated attendees.
The underlying message was clear: with Trump back in the White House and with Bannon renewing his influence with the president-elect, the most extreme and polarizing proposals at the very least were up for consideration.
“The viceroy Mike Davis tells me, since it doesn’t actually say consecutive, that maybe we do it again in ’28?” Bannon said of Trump possibly running again in his remarks at the New York Young Republican Club gala dinner that also saw a Trump adviser keel over the lectern and fall off the stage.
Riding the wave of self-congratulatory sentiment in the room, Bannon, who ignored the black-tie dress code with a wax jacket and black collared shirt, doubled down on pursuing a campaign of retribution against Trump’s perceived enemies in the news media and at the justice department.
“We want retribution and we’re going to get retribution. You have to. It’s not personal, it’s not personal,” Bannon said to the raucous room. “They need to learn what populist, nationalist power is on the receiving end.
“I need investigations, trials and then incarceration. And I’m just talking about the media. Should the media be included in the vast criminal conspiracy against President Trump? Should Andrew Weissmann on MSNBC and Rachel Maddow and all of them?”
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Robert F Kennedy Jr arrives on Capitol Hill to meet with senators
Anti-vaccine activist Robert F Kennedy Jr is on Capitol Hill to meet Republican senators who will decide if he should be confirmed as secretary of health and human services:
Kennedy has attracted much scrutiny for his embrace of various conspiracy theories, and advocacy against vaccines. But as conservative activist Charlie Kirk wrote on X, Kennedy’s appeal to Trump supporters is that he would downsize the massive federal department he is being tapped to lead:
The annual budget for HHS is over $1.8 trillion, including $130 billion in discretionary spending. A behemoth of bloat and bureaucracy.
That said, there’s one thing about Kennedy that might not sit well with some Republicans: his previous statements of support for abortion. We’ll see what lawmakers have to say about that.
Federal employee union responds to Trump threat to force workers back in office
It’s a somewhat obscure issue, but one thing Trump has made very clear he plans to do is take steps to require federal employees to work from offices that they may have stopped going to when Covid-19 broke out.
He repeated the promise at his Mar-a-Lago press conference today, saying:
If people don’t come back to work, come back into the office, they’re going to be dismissed.
In a statement, Everett Kelley, president of the American Federation of Government Employees, the largest union of federal government employees, said the issue was not as simple as Trump makes it sound:
Rumors of widespread federal telework and remote work are simply untrue. More than half of federal employees cannot telework at all because of the nature of their jobs, only ten percent of federal workers are remote, and those who have a hybrid arrangement spend over sixty percent of working hours in the office.
Kelley also threatened a fight over any steps Trump may take that run afoul of union contracts, saying: “Collective bargaining agreements entered into by the federal government are binding and enforceable under the law. We trust the incoming administration will abide by their obligations to honor lawful union contracts. If they fail to do so, we will be prepared to enforce our rights.”
Here’s more about Trump’s plans to return government workers to their offices:
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Donald Trump is considering appointing Democratic congressman Jared Moskowitz to lead the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema), CNN reports.
Moskowitz, the former director of Florida’s division of emergency management, would be a rare registered Democrat to wind up in Trump’s administration. The congressman earlier this month announced he would join the congressional caucus supporting the “Department of Government Efficiency”, the quasi-governmental effort co-chaired by billionaires Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy to downsize the federal government.
Trump has nominated some former Democrats to cabinet posts, including ex-Hawaii congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard as director of national intelligence, and anti-vaccine activist Robert F Kennedy Jr as health and human services secretary.
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Elon Musk is often by Donald Trump’s side these days, but the Guardian’s Edward Helmore reports that the government does not necessarily consider him trustworthy:
Space entrepreneur Elon Musk is unlikely to receive government security clearances if he so applied, even as his SpaceX launch company blasts military and spy agency payloads into orbit, according to a report on Monday.
The billionaire, a close ally of Donald Trump, who is set to join the incoming administration as an efficiency expert and recently became the first person to exceed $400bn in self-made personal wealth, is reported by the Wall Street Journal to have been advised by SpaceX lawyers to not seek highest-level security clearances owing to personal drug use and contacts with foreign nationals.
Musk currently holds a “top-secret” clearance that took years to obtain after he discussed use of marijuana on a 2018 podcast with Joe Rogan, according to the outlet. But that may not be enough to have access to information about US government payloads in his rockets.
Typically, candidates undergoing federal security screenings by the department of defense may not receive clearance if the agency expresses concerns about drug or alcohol use, criminal conduct, psychological conditions, sexual behavior or allegiance to the US.
According to the Journal, Musk’s lawyers outlined scenarios in which he might inadvertently disclose secrets to foreign officials with whom he regularly speaks, including the Russian president Vladimir Putin, with whom he is reported to have been in regular contact since 2022.
Musk’s use of another semi-legal drug, ketamine, in pursuit of what friends call “pure creativity”, along with reports of LSD, ecstasy and magic mushrooms, could also be an issue.
Biden briefed on Wisconsin school shooting
Joe Biden has been briefed on a school shooting in Madison, Wisconsin, which the local police chief says has left five people dead and several other injured.
“The president has been briefed on the school shooting in Madison, Wisconsin. Senior White House officials are in touch with local counterparts in Madison to provide support as needed,” the White House said.
Here’s more on this developing story:
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Regarding Israel’s assault on Gaza and the possibility for a ceasefire, Miller said:
We are pushing as hard as we know how to do at this point. We believe we can get to the deal, but again it remains incumbent on Hamas and Israel agreeing to those final terms and getting it over the line. I cannot in good conscience stand here and tell you that that’s going to happen. But it should happen.
US officials and other countries are trying to broker a deal between Israel and Hamas that would call for a ceasfire and the release of Israeli hostages and Palestinian detainees.
More than 45,000 Palestinians have been killed by Israel in Gaza since Hamas’s 7 October attacks on Israel, more than half of whom are women and children.
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US wants Syrian people to succeed, says state department spokesperson
The US state department is holding a briefing right now, much of it dedicated to the aftermath of the rapid toppling of Syria’s government, formerly led by authoritarian leader Bashar al-Assad – and what that means for the US.
Spokesperson Matthew Miller said the US’s “message to the Syrian people is this: We want them to succeed and we are prepared to help them do so.”
Miller spoke to the importance of locating and finding US journalist Austin Tice, who has been missing since 2012 but is reportedly alive, to his family. Tice’s mother, Debra, went on NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday and said she has met with the state department and the White House.
She added: “We’re just really excited about being a reunited family.”
No organization from the US government has been on the ground yet in Syria in reference to the search for Tice or other diplomatic issues since rebel forces took down the regime, the state department confirmed.
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The day so far
Donald Trump held a wide-ranging press conference from his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida, weighing in on everything from pardoning New York mayor Eric Adams (he might do it) to getting rid of the polio vaccine (he’s not in favor). The president-elect also tried to tamp down concerns that his nominee to lead the health and human services department, Robert F Kennedy Jr, would make big changes, saying instead that “he’s going to be much less radical than you would think”. Finally, Trump announced that Japanese firm SoftBank would invest $100bn in America and create 100,000 jobs, though in the past, similar promises have not panned out.
Here’s what else has happened today so far:
Democrats are making a last minute-push to convince Joe Biden to put the Equal Rights Amendment into the constitution, which would protect against sex discrimination and likely spark a court fight.
Lindsey Graham, a Republican senator who has met with Pete Hegseth, said the defense secretary nominee told him that he will allow a woman who he paid in relation to a sexual assault allegation to speak about it publicly.
Biden defended his economic record with an essay in the progressive American Prospect magazine.
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Donald Trump has a history of announcing big investments that do not turn out as advertised, and one of the prime examples from his first term was a sprawling plant in Wisconsin that electronics manufacturing giant Foxconn was to build. It never actually materialized, but despite that unmet promise, the Badger state this year voted to send Trump back to the White House. Writing before the election, the Guardian’s Callum Jones took a look at what went wrong with the much-ballyhooed investment:
Less than 30 miles south of the Fiserv Forum, the Wisconsin convention center where Republicans confirmed Donald Trump as their nominee for president for the third time, lies the site of a project Trump predicted would become “the Eighth Wonder of the World”.
While still in office, the then president traveled to Mount Pleasant in Racine county to break ground on a sprawling facility that the electronics manufacturing giant Foxconn had agreed to build – in exchange for billions of dollars’ worth of subsidies.
Flanked by local allies and executives from the company, Trump planted a golden shovel in the ground. “America is open for business more than it has ever been open for business,” he proclaimed in June 2018, as FoxConn promised to invest $10bn and hire 13,000 local workers.
Highways were built and expanded. Homes were razed. The area – a former manufacturing powerhouse – was primed for revitalization in a deal that seemed to underline the executive prowess of America’s most famous businessman, an image that has helped maintain many voters’ confidence that he could steer the US economy more competently than his rival, Kamala Harris, and could win him the White House again come November.
Trump says he would consider pardoning indicted New York mayor Eric Adams
At his just-concluded press conference in Mar-a-Lago, Donald Trump was asked if he would consider pardoning New York mayor Eric Adams, who is facing corruption charges.
“Yeah, I think that he was treated pretty unfairly,” Trump replied.
Adams has been indicted on five federal charges related to accepting gifts in exchange for favors such as helping Turkey open a new diplomatic tower in Manhattan despite concerns about its fire safety system.
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Trump says he supports polio vaccine, despite signs of RFK Jr's opposition
Last week, the New York Times reported that a lawyer who had filed petitions seeking to revoke the approval of vaccines for polio and other preventable diseases has been by Robert F Kennedy Jr’s side in interviews to hire top officials for the health and human services department.
A reporter asked Donald Trump today if he supported taking the polio vaccine out of circulation.
“You’re not going to lose the polio vaccine. That’s not going to happen,” Trump said. “I saw what happened with the polio, I have friends that were very much affected by that. I have friends from many years ago, and … they’re still in not such good shape because of it.”
The polio vaccine has been credited with suppressing, almost entirely, a disease that can cause lifelong paralysis in people who get it. Mitch McConnell, the top Senate Republican who survived the disease, condemned the news that Trump’s incoming administration could be hostile to the much-used vaccine.
However, Trump did signal some skepticism to the vaccine mandates enacted by some states and school districts. “I don’t like mandates. I’m not a big mandate person,” Trump said.
He also said that there might be a link between vaccines and pesticides and autism. “You take a look at autism today versus 20, 25 years ago, it’s like, not even believable. So we’re going to have reports,” Trump said.
But he downplayed fears that Kennedy, if confirmed to lead the nation’s health department, would make radical changes. “Nothing’s going to happen very quickly. I think you’re going to find that Bobby is much is a very rational guy,” Trump said.
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Trump expects RFK Jr to be 'much less radical' as health secretary
At his ongoing press conference, Donald Trump was asked what he would say to people concerned about the anti-vaccine views of Robert F Kennedy Jr, who he nominated to lead the department of health and human services.
“I think he’s going to be much less radical than you would think. I think he’s got a very open mind, or I wouldn’t have put him there. He’s going to be very much less radical,” Trump said, adding “there are problems we don’t do as well as a lot of other nations … and we’re going to find out what those problems are.”
He didn’t specify what those problems were, but did promise to lower prescription drug costs by eliminating “middlemen”.
“We’re paying much more than other countries, and we have laws that make it impossible to reduce and we have a thing called the middleman. You know the middleman, right? The horrible middleman that makes more money, frankly, than the drug companies, and they don’t do anything except they’re a middleman. We’re going to knock out the middleman. I’m going to be very unpopular after that statement,” Trump said.
Donald Trump announced that Japanese investment firm SoftBank would put $100bn into projects in the United States and create tens of thousands of jobs.
“We’ve just concluded a very productive meeting, and today I’m thrilled to announce that SoftBank will be investing $100bn in America, creating 100,000 American jobs at a minimum. And he’s doing this because he feels very optimistic about our country since the election and many other people are also coming in with tremendous amounts of money,” Trump said in a press conference at Mar-a-Lago.
The firm’s founder, Masayoshi Son, appeared alongside Trump, saying: “I would really like to celebrate the great victory of President Trump and my confidence level to the economy of United States has tremendously increased with his victory.
“Of course, business is important, technology is important, but one more thing I’m I’m really hoping, is that this President Trump would … bring the world into peace again. That’s my additional hope, and I think he will actually make it happen,” Son added.
The announcement is the latest instance of Trump taking credit for private sector investment announcements, whether or not they actually come into fruition. Shortly after first winning the presidency, he made a much-publicized visit to a plant owned by air conditioning manufacturer Carrier, and said he had convinced them not to move jobs overseas. The company later conducted layoffs anyway.
Here’s a look back:
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In an interview with CNN, Democratic senator Richard Blumenthal said he believes the number of Republicans who will support Pete Hegseth to lead the defense department has increased.
“His chances improved last week because Donald Trump heightened the heat on a lot of Republicans, in effect threatening them with primaries and other retribution if they fail to support Hegseth. And so a lot of the Republican senators who told me, five to 10 of them, that they thought Hegseth was doomed as a nominee have now changed their story,” said Blumenthal, who serves on the armed services committee that will be tasked with confirming him.
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With the end of his presidency in sight, Joe Biden has published an essay in the American Prospect looking back at his economic accomplishments.
“Over the last four years, we’ve faced some of the most challenging economic conditions in our history. Not only have we recovered, we’ve come out stronger, and have laid foundations for a promising new chapter in our American comeback story,” Biden writes.
“It will take years to see the full effects in terms of new jobs and new investments all around the country, but we have planted the seeds that are making this happen. If these investments and actions are built upon, U.S. economic leadership will be stronger and the middle class more secure in the years and decades ahead.”
The “challenging economic conditions” Biden writes about are the inflation that caused his popularity to slump early in his term and never recover, and is widely seen as paving the way for Donald Trump’s return to the White House.
The American Prospect is associated with the United States’s progressive movement. Barack Obama published a similar essay in late 2016, but chose to place it in the Economist, which is British and viewed as ranging from liberal to centrist in its political leanings.
Another difference between the two pieces: Obama’s was published before Trump won the presidential election, and Biden’s afterwards.
Trump expected to speak from Mar-a-Lago
Donald Trump is expected to at 11am speak to reporters from his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida.
The president-elect has spoken publicly only occasionally in the weeks since he won re-election to the White House, instead making his views known through posts on Truth Social, or statements from his transition team.
Trump did not say what he will be talking about, but we will let you know when we find out.
By all accounts, Donald Trump is sticking by Pete Hegseth, despite the sexual assault accusation and other reports of bad behavior circling around him.
Hegseth was seen with Trump, JD Vance and other top Republicans and their allies this weekend, at the army-navy football game in Maryland:
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Republican senator says Hegseth told him sexual assault accuser is free to testify
Republican senator Lindsey Graham says Pete Hegseth, the former Fox News host who Donald Trump nominated to lead the defense department, told him that he has allowed a woman who accused him of sexual assault to speak publicly.
While police brought no charges over the alleged assault, Hegseth reportedly paid the accuser a settlement, in exchange for her signing a nondisclosure agreement about the allegation. In a Sunday interview with NBC News, Graham said that Hegseth “told me he would release her from that agreement”.
Graham, who had expressed some concerns about Hegseth as the sexual assault allegations and reports of other bad behavior came to light, otherwise spoke positively about the defense secretary nominee:
I’m in a good place with Pete unless something I don’t know about comes out. These allegations are disturbing, but they’re anonymous. I asked him point blank, were you drunk in a bar and got up and said, let’s kill all the Muslims. He said, no. There’s one allegation on a police report about sexual assault, that person has the right to come forward to the committee. But about mismanagement of money, about, you know, having a drinking problem and saying inappropriate things, all of these are anonymous allegations.
He’s given me his side of the story. It makes sense to me, I believe him. Unless somebody’s willing to come forward, I think he’s going to get through.
New York senator Gillibrand pushes Biden to publish ERA – report
In addition to the more than 120 Democratic lawmakers who sent Joe Biden a letter this weekend urging him to have the Equal Rights Amendment added to the constitution, New York senator Kirsten Gillibrand is on a personal quest to get the president on board.
The New York Times reports that the Democrat has made the case to whoever will listen to her that the ERA has met the threshold for ratification, and the president should order it published. From Gillibrand’s interview with the Times:
Ms. Gillibrand has pleaded her E.R.A. case at every available opportunity. The third-term New Yorker has met with Jeffrey D. Zients, the White House chief of staff, and Anita Dunn, a former top adviser to Mr. Biden. Her request is for a five-minute meeting with Mr. Biden himself. She has used passing 30-second interactions in photo lines to personally pitch the president, so far to no avail.
Ms. Gillibrand has presented White House officials with fat binders full of legal research and polling, which have on the cover a printout of Mr. Biden posing as if he is on a Taylor Swift Eras Tour poster. (E.R.A. — get it?)
Ms. Gillibrand sat down with Minyon Moore, one of Vice President Kamala Harris’s top advisers and confidantes, to persuade Ms. Harris to champion the E.R.A. and asked her to speak to other White House officials about it. Still, nothing happened.
Undeterred, Ms. Gillibrand has continued to text and harangue and flatter, all in service of procuring a brief meeting with Mr. Biden to make a more comprehensive pitch.
“I’ve never done more legal analysis and work since I was a lawyer,” Ms. Gillibrand said. So far, she has been strung along.
“It’s ‘I’ll get back to you; I’ll get back to you.’ Everyone always says, ‘We love your arguments.’ I never know what the ‘but’ is.”
Kelly Scully, a White House spokeswoman, said senior administration officials had been discussing the proposal with lawmakers and other stakeholders.
“President Biden has been clear that he wants to see the Equal Rights Amendment definitively enshrined in the Constitution,” Ms. Scully said in a statement. “It is long past time that we recognize the clear will of the American people.”
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Democrats make last-minute push to add Equal Rights Amendment to US constitution
Good morning, US politics blog readers. Dozens of Democratic lawmakers have proposed a novel idea for Joe Biden to secure his presidential legacy in his final weeks in office: decide that the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), which protects against sex discrimination, has met the standard for ratification, and have the Archivist of the United States publish the amendment into the constitution. The proposal was approved by the US House and Senate in the early 1970s but a conservative backlash prevented it from being ratified by the necessary two-thirds of states by a 1982 deadline congress had set.
In the years since, several states have voted to approve the amendment, and in a letter to Biden sent over the weekend, more than 120 House Democrats argued that the ERA has met the requirements, and should be added to the constitution as the 28th amendment, and the first since 1992. The subtext here is Donald Trump’s impending arrival in the White House, and the likelihood that Biden publishing the ERA would trigger a court fight that casts a shadow over the newly arrived president, particularly since he is viewed as politically vulnerable among women. We’ll tell you more about the ERA push today.
Here’s what else is going on:
Robert F Kennedy Jr, the anti-vaccine activist Trump has named to lead the health and human services department, is heading to Capitol Hill to meet with Republican senators throughout the day.
Biden will at 12.15pm hold an event at the labor department to promote his administration’s efforts to help American workers, then convene a Hanukkah reception at 7.45pm.
Syrian diplomats and community leaders plan to today hoist the flag of “Free Syria” at its Washington DC embassy, which has been closed since 2014.
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