Trump confirms plan to use US military for mass deportations with more cabinet picks expected: Live updates

Donald Trump’s search for someone to lead the Treasury Department continued over the weekend while one of his new close allies placed his thumb on the scale.

Elon Musk, the Twitter/X/Tesla/SpaceX CEO and top Trump booster, has been increasingly hanging around Mar-a-Lago and the president-elect himself in the days since Trump’s victory in the 2024 presidential election. Having put a considerable sum behind backing Republicans this cycle, Musk seems eager for a return on his investment — he is now publicly urging the incoming president towards one of the two men seen as finalists for the job of Treasury secretary.

On Saturday — the same day he appeared alongside the president-elect at the UFC championship at Madison Square Garden — Musk made his appeal public.

John Bowden has the story.

A company affiliated with conspiracy theorist Alex Jones asked a federal judge on Monday to disqualify a bid by the satirical news outlet The Onion to buy Jones’ Infowars at a bankruptcy auction, alleging fraud and collusion.

The company, First United American Companies, which is affiliated with a Jones website that sells dietary supplements, was the only other bidder at the recent auction, offering $3.5 million. In a filing in federal bankruptcy court in Houston, a lawyer for the company asked the judge to declare it the winning bidder instead of The Onion.

The lawyer, Walter Cicack, claimed that the bankruptcy trustee overseeing the auction improperly colluded with The Onion and families of victims of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in Connecticut in naming The Onion the winning bidder. Cicack also alleged the trustee violated rules for the sale set by the judge, and said the company’s cash offer was twice the amount of The Onion’s.

The bankruptcy auction was held last week as part of the liquidation of Jones’ assets, including Infowars. Proceeds from the sale will go to Sandy Hook families and other creditors. Jones filed bankruptcy in 2022 after he was ordered to pay nearly $1.5 billion in defamation lawsuits filed by the families for calling the 2012 shooting that killed 20 children and six educators a hoax staged by actors to increase gun control.

Ben Collins, CEO of The Onion’s parent company, Chicago-based Global Tetrahedron, issued a statement Monday through a spokesperson.

“We’re obviously disappointed he’s lashing out by creating conspiracies, but we’re also not surprised,” he said, referring to Jones.

The bankruptcy trustee appointed to oversee the sale, Christopher Murray, declined to comment Monday. A lawyer for the Sandy Hook families, Christopher Mattei, also declined to comment.

In a response filed in court later Monday, Murray called the allegations “baseless.” He said the motion by First United American to disqualify The Onion was “a disappointed bidder’s improper attempt to influence an otherwise fair and open auction process.”

Murray also wrote, “Having failed in its prior efforts to bully the Trustee and his advisors into accepting its inferior bid, FUAC now alleges, without evidence, collusion and bad faith in an attempt to mislead the Court and disqualify its only competition in the auction.”

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Eric Garcia writes:

When president-elect Donald Trump announced that he would nominateRobert F Kennedy Jr to be his secretary of Health and Human Services, the move shocked many. Kennedy, the son of the late senator from New York and US attorney general, has made a name for himself primarily promoting the bogus link that vaccines cause autism.

It is unclear whether Kennedy could get confirmed, even with a Republican Senate majority. Mike Pence, Trump’s former vice president, made the rare move of denouncing Kennedy as insufficiently opposed to abortion.

Needless to say, almost all, if not all, Democrats will oppose Kennedy’s confirmation. Plenty of Republicans might have some objections as well.

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Kamala Harris’s defeat to Donald Trump was caused by many factors, and one of them was a surge of Latino support for the GOP ticket even as Democrats were confident that warnings about Trump’s mass deportation plan would prevent that from happening.

Now, one of the Democrats who won on November 5 despite the underperformance of the top of his party’s ticket is warning members of his party to actually listen to Latino voters if they want to win them back for future election cycles.

John Bowden reports from Washington, DC.

President-elect Donald Trump boasted during the campaign he would need about 15 minutes to get a deal done between the PGA Tour and the Saudi investors of LIV Golf. That started with four hours on the golf course with PGA Tour Commissioner Jay Monahan.

The Washington Post reported Monahan accepted an invitation from Trump to play golf last Friday at Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach, Florida.

The PGA Tour confirmed the outing in a statement.

Read the full article here.

Donald Trump has confirmed the military could be used to carry out mass deportations, just as a new review of polling revealed growing support for his approach to tackling illegal immigration.

The president-elect also suggested a national emergency could be declared on the issue once he is in power when he responded to a supporter’s post on his Truth Social platform on Monday morning.

Alex Woodward reports.

About one in five Americans – and a virtually identical share of Republicans and Democrats – regularly get their news from digital influencers who are more likely to be found on the social media platform X, according to a report released Monday by the Pew Research Center.

The findings, drawn from a survey of more than 10,000 U.S. adults and an analysis of social media posts posted this summer by influencers, provide an indication of how Americans consumed the news during the height of the U.S. presidential campaign that President-elect Donald Trump ultimately won.

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Eric Hovde, the Republican challenger to Wisconsin Senator Tammy Baldwin, has conceded the race in a video message. He says that he won't request a recount as he doesn't want to add to “political strife”

Senator Baldwin's lead is just over 27,000 votes, out of more than 3 million cast.

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has released a statement about the upcoming vacancy in the Senate when Florida Senator Marco Rubio departs for his new role as Secretary of State for Donald Trump’s second administration.

It is the role of the governor to appoint an interim senator to serve in the role ahead of a special election likely in the 2026 mid-terms.

DeSantis writes:

Senator Marco Rubio is expected to resign from the Senate to assume duties as Secretary of State when the Trump administration takes power on January 20th, creating a vacancy roughly two months from today.

We have already received strong interest from several possible candidates, and we continue to gather names of additional candidates and conduct preliminary vetting. More extensive vetting and candidate interviews will be conducted over the next few weeks, with a selection likely made by the beginning of January.

Florida deserves a Senator who will help President Trump deliver on his election mandate, be strong on immigration and border security, take on the entrenched bureaucracy and administrative state, reverse the nation’s fiscal decline, be animated by conservative principles, and has a proven record of results.