Matt Gaetz admits to womanizing and partying too much as he slams House’s move to release ethics report: Live

Donald Trump has formally won the Electoral College and the presidency after Texas’ electors handed him the state’s 40 electoral votes Tuesday.

After Trump’s election win on November 5, his victory was formalized Tuesday as presidential electors gathered across the U.S.

It takes 270 electoral votes to win the Electoral College — Trump won 312 last month to Vice President Kamala Harris’s 226.

The votes of each state will be sent on to Congress next month, where Trump and Vice President-elect J.D. Vance will be declared the next president and vice president before they take office at noon on January 20.

Senate Republicans fear that the confirmation hearings for secretary of defense nominee Pete Hegseth will be a repeat of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s heated 2018 hearings.

Both Kavanaugh and Hegseth have been accused of sexual misconduct and have rejected the allegations. Hegseth’s plan to release his accuser from a nondisclosure agreement is setting up the hearing to be filled with tension and fervor from both Democrats and Republicans.

Hegseth is set to push ahead with his nomination despite warnings from Senate Republicans that he’s likely to face a frenzy of uncomfortable questions about the sexual misconduct allegations and the claims against him of excessive drinking and financial mismanagement.

Read more:

Incoming First Lady Melania Trump is devoted to ensuring her 18-year-old son, Barron Trump, is happy and healthy which will likely make her role in the White House less visible than other first ladies, insiders say.

Melania, 54, strives for “open communication” with her son, who recently began attending college at New York University, to help him adjust to the spotlight, two sources familiar with the Trump family told People.

“Melania worries about the hate in the country and how it falls on her son, who is innocent of any of this,” a social source told the magazine.

Read more:

The moment my children became interested in the US election was not when Taylor Swift declared her support for Kamala Harris, it was when Elon Musk appeared alongside Donald Trump.

They’re late teenagers – young adults – and Musk is their hero. It’s not just that he’s the world’s richest man, although that adds considerable lustre. It’s because he breaks boundaries, not least with his attempts to award himself a $56bn pay package, compensation that a judge this week ruled excessive.

He’s also the future, their future. They admire the Tesla – ‘faster than a motorbike from traffic lights’ one said to me recently. They can take or leave X, it’s not their network. And the space rocket reversing into a dock, as neatly as any car – that video has been replayed in our household countless times.

Read more:

Japanese tycoon Masayoshi Son and President-elect Donald Trump have announced plans for technology and telecoms giant SoftBank Group to invest $100 billion in projects in the United States over the coming four years.

Trump said the investments in building artificial intelligence infrastructure would create 100,000 jobs, twice the 50,000 promised when Son pledged $50 billion in U.S. investments after Trump’s victory in 2016.

Son, a founder and CEO of SoftBank Group, is known for making bold choices that sometimes pay big and sometimes don’t. SoftBank has investments in dozens of Silicon Valley startups, along with big companies like semiconductor design company Arm and Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba. The stock market rally and craze for AI has boosted the value of its assets, but it’s unclear whether its investments will create that many jobs.

Who is Masayoshi Son?

After losing the ranking member spot on the House Oversight Committee to Rep. Gerry Connolly, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez wrote on BlueSky: “Tried my best. Sorry I couldn’t pull it through everyone - we live to fight another day.”

After amassing more than 170 million users in the country in less than seven years, TikTok is now facing an outright ban in the US.

On 19 January, just one day before Donald Trump is set to be inaugurated as president, the country is set to become the latest to completely ban the Chinese-owned app.

TikTok’s parent company ByteDance is still attempting to reverse the ruling, and has three potential ways to avoid the nationwide ban. The first is to ask the US Supreme Court to intervene, which it did on Monday. The second is to convince Trump to reverse the decision when he comes into office, with TikTok chief executive Shou Zi Chew reportedly meeting with the incoming president on Monday. And the third – though this appears increasingly unlikely – ByteDance can abide by the ruling and sell TikTok to a US-based owner.

Read more:

Donald Trump Jr has said he will always “care for” Kimberly Guilfoyle and that the couple retain “a special bond” amid reports that they have ended their four-year engagement and parted ways.

While the couple has still not officially confirmed the split, the president-elect’s eldest son, 46, was recently pictured with Florida socialite Bettina Anderson celebrating her 38th birthday at Buccan, an exclusive Palm Beach restaurant, and enjoying a romantic evening stroll along the beach.

The photos, published by The Daily Mail, coincided with Guilfoyle, 55, being picked by President-elect Donald Trump to be his next US ambassador to Greece, leading to jokes from the likes of late-night host Jimmy Kimmel that she had effectively been exiled to Athens to avoid an embarrassing break-up.

Now, Don Jr has told Page Six he and Guilfoyle “will never stop caring for each other” – though he stopped short of confirming their relationship is over.

“Kimberly and I will never stop caring for each other and will always keep a special bond,” he said.