Trump cabinet live updates: Trump nominates Dr Oz and Linda McMahon as he joins Elon Musk for SpaceX launch

The former WWE CEO served as the head of the Small Business Administration from 2017 to 2019.

President-elect Donald Trump’s approval rating is now more than 20 points higher than when he left the White House in early 2021.

A majority of Americans now approve of the work Trump is doing as he makes his unorthodox cabinet picks, such as nominating former Florida Congressman Matt Gaetz to be his attorney general and Fox & Friends weekend host Pete Hegseth to be his secretary of defense.

The Harvard CAPS/Harris poll found that 54 percent approve of Trump, while 40 percent disapprove. Ninety-one percent of Republicans approved of Trump’s job performance, while 49 percent of independents and 22 percent of Democrats said the same.

Gustaf Kilander reports.

Kennedy once suggested COVID was part of a ‘biosecurity agenda that will enslave the entire human race and plunge us into a dystopian nightmare’.

President-elect Donald Trump has chosen Howard Lutnick, head of brokerage and investment bank Cantor Fitzgerald and cryptocurrency enthusiast, as his nominee for commerce secretary.

The nomination would put Lutnick in charge of a sprawling Cabinet agency that is involved in funding new computer chip factories, imposing trade restrictions, releasing economic data and monitoring the weather. It is also a position in which connections to CEOs and the wider business community are crucial.

Lutnick, a co-chair of Trump’s transition team, along with Linda McMahon, the former wrestling executive who previously led Trump’s Small Business Administration, once appeared on Trump’s NBC reality show, “The Apprentice.” He has become a part of the president-elect’s inner circle.

Here are things to know about the billionaire who, if confirmed by the Senate, will lead the Commerce Department:

Read the full article here.

Eric Garcia writes:

n Monday, Senator Kyrsten Sinema, the soon-to-be retired Democrat-turned-independent from Arizona, responded to remarks from Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer urging Republicans to not “misread the will of the people” and “abandon the need for bipartisanship.”

“What’s the one tool that requires the Senate to work in a bipartisan way?” she said on X/Twitter. “Oh look, the filibuster.”

Elsewhere, Senator Joe Manchin, the conservative Democrat who also became an independent, made it clear that he felt a small amount of vindication, after he’d spent much of Joe Biden’s first two years in office harping about inflation.

“I’m not going to say I told you so,” he told The Independent on Monday, but, as he boarded the Senate elevator, he added that people should have been paying attention. He was sort of right, given that the 2024 election turned out to largely be a referendum on the high cost of living.

Continue reading...

Right-wing lawmaker Marjorie Taylor Greene says she will expose “sexual harassment and assault claims” against her fellow Republicans if the House Ethics Committee releases their “highly damaging” report on Matt Gaetz.

Representative Greene of Georgia defended Gaetz, Trump’s pick for attorney general, on Tuesday morning. She warned that “if we are going to release ethics reports and rip apart our own that Trump has appointed,” she will “put it ALL out there.”

“Yes..all the ethics reports and claims including the one I filed,” Greene wrote on X. “All your sexual harassment and assault claims that were secretly settled paying off victims with tax payer money.”

Katie Hawkinson has the full story.

Since announcing their post-election meeting with Donald Trump, Morning Joe hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski have received a fierce backlash from the GOP and fellow members of the media, who described the stunt as “dishonest.”

The pair have defended their decision to visit the President-elect for the first time in seven years as an opportunity to “restart communications” after being fierce critics of Trump in the run-up to the 2024 election. In their coverage, Scarborough and Brzezinski described Trump as “erratic,” slamming his election fraud efforts and warning of “how dark of a place” the US would be if Trump won. In September, Scarborough said that it was “not a reach” to compare the President-elect to Hitler.

However, aside from the acrimony of the 2024 election cycle, a meeting between Scarborough and Trump is even more astonishing given their previous interactions, centered around the death of a young congressional staffer Lori Klausutis more than 20 years ago.

Mike Bedigan reports.

Donald Trump has threatened to use the military to enact mass deportations after making illegal immigration one of his flagship policies during the 2024 election — with the president-elect saying he will boot millions of people from the country.

Trump has boasted of planning the “largest deportation operation in American history,” saying there is no price tag for the scheme. His chosen border czar Tom Homan is a hardliner, having promised “shock and awe” when he starts the job and describing current government policy on immigration as “national suicide.”

But beyond the hyperbole, how many migrants would Trump have to remove for it to be the biggest deportation the U.S. has ever seen?

Here is a look at the track record of the last three presidents — including Trump — on how many people have actually been deported:

President Joe Biden’s pending request for nearly $100 billion in emergency disaster aid includes money to rebuild Baltimore’s Francis Scott Key Bridge, which collapsed under the impact of a massive container ship that lost power and veered off course in March.

Within hours of the disaster, Biden said the federal government will pay for the entire cost of reconstructing that bridge, and I expect the Congress to support my effort.” He visited Baltimore in the weeks that followed and reiterated his pledge of support.

Continue reading...