Welcome to The Hill’s Defense & NatSec newsletter
{beacon}
Copyright 2024 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. For the latest news, weather, sports, and streaming video, head to The Hill.
|
The president-elect and one of his advisers just shifted an important timetable.
Steve Bannon, President-elect Donald Trump’s former advisor who helped steer conservative media into the arms of the xenophobic far-right, has vowed to get Trump’s new favorite confidant booted from the White House orbit before next week’s inauguration. “I will get Elon Musk kicked out by the time he’s inaugurated,” Bannon told Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera. "He won’t have a blue pass with full access to the White House. He’ll be like everyone else.” Bannon, a former investment banker an
Donald Trump's niece also pinpointed "one of the most frustrating things" about his response to the California wildfires.
Get someone to keep Trump’s lawyer away from Andrew Tate, like, now. Alina Habba, who also will serve as incoming counselor to the president during Trump’s second term, heaped fawning praise on the notorious self-proclaimed misogynist during a recent session of right-wing podcast The Benny Show. Tate’s deep contempt for women—as well as his repeat arrests on charges, among other things, of organized crime, rape and sexual assault—appeared of little consequence to the attorney, who went so far as
The governor of California slammed incoming President-elect Donald Trump for spreading false claims about efforts to curtail the deadly wildfires ravaging the south of the state. In a Sunday interview with MSNBC’s Meet the Press, Gov. Gavin Newsom told reporter Jacob Soboroff that Trump had not taken him up on an open invitation to come and survey the damage in Southern California. As Soboroff put it to Newsom, “President-elect Trump has blamed you for the crisis. He called you incompetent, what
Mike Pence poured fuel on the theory that his wife intentionally snubbed Donald Trump at Jimmy Carter’s funeral this week. The former vice president seemed to obliquely hint at Karen Pence’s disdain for the president-elect when asked about her failure to acknowledge Trump and his wife, Melania, in an interview with Christianity Today. “You’d have to ask my wife about her posture,” he said, “but we’ve been married 44 years, and she loves her husband, and her husband respects her deeply.”
Until recently, Vladimir Putin insisted, at least publicly, that he didn’t want a cult of his personality. Not anymore. During the last three years of the war he started in Ukraine, he has embraced it. At his annual press conference last month, Putin nodded with a serious face and boasted about improving his skills—he enjoyed talking about himself more than ever. His lips pressed in a sour grimace, he described himself: “I joke less now, and I have almost stopped laughing.” The serious Putin tal
Vice President-elect JD Vance said people who “committed violence” on Jan. 6, 2021, “obviously” shouldn’t be pardoned by President-elect Trump. “I think it’s very simple, look, if you protested peacefully on Jan. 6, and you had Merrick Garland’s Department of Justice treat you like a gang member, you should be pardoned,” Vance said during an…
Mark Zuckerberg’s shock decision to scrap fact-checking on Facebook and Instagram has sparked concern and outrage—including from inside the top ranks of the company. Michael McConnell, co-chair of Meta’s Oversight Board, said in an interview Friday that the move looks like “buckling to political pressure.” “I would have liked to have seen these reforms laid out in less contentious and partisan times, so that they would be considered on the merits rather than… Donald Trump is president and now th
Trump could sweeten the deal by making Putin an offer he can’t refuse.
Senator Lindsay Graham on Sunday had his tax cuts argument comprehensively pulled apart by a member of his own party. On Fox News’ weekend broadcast of Sunday Morning Futures, host Maria Bartiromo played a clip from an interview with the veteran GOP lawmaker in which he railed against New York’s policy of letting residents deduct certain taxes paid to state and local governments on their federal forms, known as the SALT deduction. Graham said during the clip: “I’m saying that as we negotiate tax
Ukraine claimed Saturday to have struck one of Russia’s largest oil refineries in a drone attack, starting a fire at the facility more than 700 miles into Russian territory.
Critics cringed over how the Republican lawmaker tackled past condemnation from the president-elect.
The sentencing of former (and future) President Donald J. Trump in a Manhattan courtroom on Friday was the culmination of a titanic legal saga that tested, and arguably rent, the legal and political structure of the United States. But while one might have expected that such a struggle would conclude with a roar, it instead ended with a quiet whimper. It didn’t have to be that way. Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg had revived the election interference case against Trump after first nearly
Donald Trump’s second term will empower the White Christian nationalist movement, says scholar Kristin Kobes Du Mez, author of “Jesus and John Wayne.” “It will transform our government,” she says. “They have seen their movement go mainstream, and now they have incredible access to power.”
Special Counsel Jack Smith has resigned from the Justice Department effective Friday, according to a court filing.
The chances of an interest rate cut in early 2025 are falling faster than the Aussie dollar, with experts saying the drop in our currency could cause the Reserve Bank to baulk at a cut.
Outoing FBI director Christopher Wray said he decided to step down because it was clear President-elect Trump “intended to make a change” with the agency. “My decision to retire from the FBI, I have to tell you, it was one of the hardest decisions I’ve ever had to make,” Wray said in an exit interview…
CNN anchor Jake Tapper seemed puzzled by Alabama Sen. Katie Britt’s unconditional support for attorney general nominee Pam Bondi, questioning how the Republican could support someone who lied about the 2020 election results. Tapper pressed Britt, a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, during Sunday’s State of the Union about her meeting with and support for Bondi. Britt said last month Bondi was committed to “blind justice, not blind partisan politics,” even though Bondi was part of Donald
The far-right political strategist promised to remove Musk from Trump's inner circle in a recent interview with the Italian newspaper, Corriere della Sera.
