Closing summary
Thank you for following our live coverage. This blog is closing, but we will be back on Friday to chronicle the second Trump administration.
A federal judge in Seattle blocked Donald Trump’s executive order curtailing the right to automatic birthright citizenship in the US. US district judge John Coughenour, a Reagan appointee, issued a temporary restraining order preventing the administration from enforcing the order, calling it “blatantly unconstitutional”.
The Senate voted to advance the nomination of Pete Hegseth to become the next US secretary of defense, despite some Republican opposition. Senators Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska announced they would oppose Hegseth’s nomination, making them the first two Republican lawmakers to publicly reject one of Trump’s cabinet picks.
The Associated Press reports that Hegseth told Senator Elizabeth Warren in writing that he paid $50,000 to the woman who accused him of sexual assault in 2017.
Donald Trump signed an executive order to support the cryptocurrency industry, as his daughter Ivanka warned investors not to buy “a fake crypto coin called ‘Ivanka Trump’ or ‘$IVANKA’”.
Newark’s mayor denounced a warrantless federal immigration raid on a business in his city. Mayor Ras J Baraka said his city “will not stand idly by” after citizens, including a veteran, were detained.
The Senate voted to confirm John Ratcliffe as CIA director, giving Trump the second member of his new cabinet. The Senate voted to confirm Ratcliffe, a former Texas representative and director of national intelligence during Trump’s first term, by 74-25, with 20 Democrats and one independent joining Republicans in backing the nomination.
Trump made a combative return to the world stage in an address to the World Economic Forum in Davos, accusing oil producers of prolonging the Ukraine war by failing to cut prices and threatening tariffs on all US imports. He repeated his call for Nato countries to dramatically increase defence spending and complained about what he called an “unfair” trading relationship with China.
The state department has frozen all applications for passports with “X” sex markers and changes to gender identity on existing passports, following a new executive order signed by Trump on his first day of office. “The policy of the United States is that an individual’s sex is not changeable,” according to an internal email from the secretary of state, Marco Rubio, that was shared with the Guardian.
Updated
Trump’s attempt to end birthright citizenship through an executive order may have outraged a federal judge appointed by Ronald Reagan, who called it “blatantly unconstitutional” on Thursday, but the effort thrilled one longtime advocate of the move, John Eastman.
Eastman, the conservative legal scholar who devised the plot to deny Joe Biden’s 2020 victory by submitting slates of fake electors to Congress, and who was indicted on conspiracy, fraud and forgery charges in Arizona, has argued for decades that the 14th amendment to the constitution does not guarantee citizenship to children born to non-citizens.
“The left is going bonkers over President Trump’s Exec. Order on birthright citizenship,” Eastman wrote gleefully on Wednesday. The lawsuits filed to block Trump’s order, he added, made what he called “the false claim that the issue was settled 150 years ago”.
Eastman, a fellow at the far-right Claremont Institute, came to Trump’s attention thanks to an appearance on Fox News in 2019 that led to an invitation to the Oval Office.
In 2020, Eastman’s fringe reading of the 14 amendment was briefly a campaign issue when he argued in a Newsweek op-ed, the publication later apologized for, that Kamala Harris was not entitled to citizenship when she was born in Oakland, California, in 1964 to immigrant parents – and so, was not eligible to ever be vice-president or president.
According to Eastman, the amendment granting citizenship to “all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof”, should be read to exclude the children of people who are not US citizens when their child is born.
Harris, he wrote, had no claim to citizenship at birth, since her parents were still, at the time, “subject” not to the jurisdiction of the United States but to their native lands of India and Jamaica.
An editor’s note added to Eastman’s Newsweek piece after it was published said:
“This op-ed is being used by some as a tool to perpetuate racism and xenophobia. We apologize. The essay, by John Eastman, was intended to explore a minority legal argument about the definition of who is a ‘natural-born citizen’ in the United States. But to many readers, the essay inevitably conveyed the ugly message that Senator Kamala Harris, a woman of color and the child of immigrants, was somehow not truly American. The op-ed was never intended to spark or to take part in the racist lie of Birtherism”.
Updated
