Trump team looks to roll back student debt relief in latest move targeting American pocketbooks: Live

As markets and world leaders reacted to the president-elect’s bombshell trade announcement on Monday evening, Trump himself was celebrating a major legal victory after a judge in DC agreed to dismiss the federal election interference indictment against him.

Citing a precedent that prevents a sitting president from being charged, Justice Department special counsel Jack Smith said his team is treating Trump as a current president and asked that the case be abandoned – to which Judge Tanya Chutkan duly agreed.

Smith stressed that the reason for the motion had nothing to do with the strength of the evidence.

His case accused Trump of pushing false claims of voter fraud and engaging in a fake elector scheme to overturn his 2020 election defeat to Joe Biden.

Smith’s team also moved to abandon its attempt to revive its classified documents case against Trump.

This was how he reacted on Truth Social:

Mike Bedigan and Ariana Baio have more.

Good morning!

President-elect Donald Trump has vowed to impose massive tariffs on China, Canada and Mexico with the aim of stopping drug smuggling.

The threatened double-digit tariffs would likely have major impacts on key sectors of the US economy, including auto manufacturing, crude oil and agriculture, all of which involve major trade with the named countries.

The measures could also further drive inflation.

Here’s what Trump had to say about it on Truth Social...

...and here’s a full report from Andrew Feinberg and Josh Marcus.

Elon Musk is among the Donald Trump allies cheering the president-elect’s threat to tariff Canada, Mexico, and China to stop drug smuggling.

“Price of Fentanyl will rise sharply,” Musk wrote on X.

While the tariffs are unlikely to impact illicit drug flows across the U.S. border, where most fentanyl is brought in by U.S. citizens at official ports of entry, they might impact Musk himself.

Tesla is reportedly building a factory in Mexico, one of numerous U.S. automakers with cross-border ties to suppliers and factories.

President-elect Donald Trump has endorsed Florida’s Chief Financial Officer Jimmy Patronis to replace Matt Gaetz in the US House of Representatives.

Patronis, a long-time ally to the president-elect, has served as Florida’s CFO since 2017. He is married with two children and owns a seafood restaurant in Panama City.

In January, the CFO promoted a state bill that would have helped Trump, whose Mar-a-Lago residence is in Florida, pay his mounting legal fees.

Read more here

Walmart is cutting back its diversity programs after a conservative activist threatened to call a boycott days before Black Friday.

Robby Starbuck, a former music video director who campaigns against corporate diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, said on Monday that he had persuaded the US retail giant to end a raft of “woke policies” such as providing racial equity training to its workers and funding anti-racist non-profits.

The company will review all funding for LGBT+ Pride events, remove all “transgender products” marketed to children from its stores, and stop participating in the Human Rights Council’s LGBT+ equality index.

It will also stop using the terms “DEI” and “LatinX” in official communications and stop requiring its suppliers to provide “certain demographic data” as part of its supplier diversity program.

Io Dodds has the story.

The Trump administration might kick traditional journalists out of the White House press room and replace them with online media personalities, according to Donald Trump, Jr.

“We had the conversation about opening up the press room to a lot of these independent journalists,” Trump said on his Rumble show “Triggered.”

”Why not open it up to people who have larger viewerships, stronger followings?” he added.

Trump, who said he recently talked about the idea with his father, president-elect Donald Trump, claimed such a step was necessary because outlets like The New York Times “lied” and had been “adverse to everything.”

Project 2025, the right-wing blueprint for a future GOP administration that has influenced Trump administration proposals and appointees, also suggested booting out standard White House beat reporters.

After federal prosecutors signaled their plans to abandon the criminal cases against Trump, the president-elect celebrated his legal victory by insulting prosecutors, judges and district attorneys.

On Truth Social, Trump called the cases “empty and lawless” declaring they should have never been brought against him because they wasted “$100 Million Dollars of Taxpayer Dollars.”

As he has done in the past, Trump claimed the cases were politically motivated and brought by Democrats.

He insulted Fulton County DA Fani Willis and special prosecutor Nathan Wade, two people who oversaw the Georgia federal election interference case and faced accusations of misconduct. Claiming Wade has “zero experience”, Trump accused the two of taking vacations together using the money Wade was paid with.

He lashed out at Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg, claiming Bragg did not want to bring the New York hush-money case against Trump but did so at the behest of the Justice Department. The New York case was separate from federal criminal inquiries.

Trump also accused New York AG Letitia James of unethically and “probably illegally” campaigning on a platform of holding Trump accountable.

 “It was a political hijacking, and a low point in the History of our Country that such a thing could have happened, and yet, I persevered, against all odds, and WON,” Trump said.

A majority of Americans are satisfied with Donald Trump’s election victory and approve of the transition process into his new administration, according to a CBS/YouGov poll released on Monday.

According to the poll, 59 percent of respondents approve of the transition process and 55 percent are happy or satisfied with Trump’s victory.

That support, however, is highly fractured on partisan lines, with 95 percent of Republicans optimistic or excited about Trump compared with just 15 percent of Democrats.

Elon Musk has appeared to confirm that his social media company X, formerly Twitter, throttles traffic to other websites by stifling any posts that contain outside links.

Paul Graham, an influential tech investor and essayist, had complained on Sunday about X’s “deprioritization of tweets with links in them,” saying it made it harder to “find out what’s going on.”

“Just write a description in the main post and put the link in the reply. This just stops lazy linking,” Musk replied.

Graham then questioned why it should be any less “lazy” for him to link to one of his essays in a reply rather than an initial post, but Musk had not responded further as of Monday evening.

Io Dodds reports.