Politico: “Republican lawmakers jockeying to lead House committees in the next Congress are touting their loyalty to [Trump] as much as their ability to advance policy priorities as they make appeals to colleagues over the next two weeks.”
“The extent to which allegiance to Trump carries the day will be a key first test of his hold on Congress, particularly since most of the races will be decided by secret ballot.”
“Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo is on an urgent mission: get as much high-tech spending out the door before Donald Trump takes office,” Politico reports.
“The Biden administration is aiming to commit nearly every unspent dollar in its $50 billion microchip-subsidy program before President-elect Donald Trump takes over in January, an effort that would effectively cement a massive industrial legacy before the GOP can reverse course.”
“A thousand miles from the austere buildings where Washington runs, Donald Trump’s transition team in his Mar-a-Lago resort has begun what a close ally calls a hostile takeover of the federal government,” the Washington Post reports.
“Since his victory, Trump has ignored many of the rules and practices intended to guide a seamless transfer of power and handover of the oversight of 2.2 million federal employees. Instead, the president-elect, who has pledged to fire thousands of civil servants and slash billions of dollars in spending, has so far almost fully cut out the government agencies his predecessors have relied on to take charge of the federal government.”
“Trump has yet to collaborate with the General Services Administration, which is tasked with the complex work of handing over control of hundreds of agencies, because he has not turned in required pledges to follow ethics rules. His transition teams have yet to set foot inside a single federal office.”
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“SpaceX’s latest test flight of its Starship vehicle on Tuesday got off to a sobering start, as the company was unable to recover the enormous booster stage of the rocket, the most powerful ever built. But about an hour later, the vehicle’s upper stage was more successful with the completion of a daring maneuver to splash down in the Indian Ocean,” the New York Times reports.
“The late-afternoon launch brought President-elect Donald Trump to the company’s South Texas launch site along the Gulf of Mexico for a show of solidarity with Elon Musk, SpaceX’s founder and the world’s richest man, who helped catapult the former president back to the White House.”
Financial Times: SpaceX abandons attempt to catch Starship booster as Donald Trump watches on.
“President Joe Biden has authorized the provision of antipersonnel land mines to Ukraine, two U.S. officials said, a step that will bolster Kyiv’s defenses against advancing Russian troops but has drawn criticism from arms control groups,” the Washington Post reports.
“The move comes in the wake of the White House’s recent authorization allowing Ukraine to use a powerful long-range missile system to strike inside Russia — part of a sweep of urgent actions the lame-duck Biden administration is taking to help Kyiv’s faltering war effort.”
Gabriel Sherman: “For now, Donald Trump is reportedly standing by Pete Hegseth, his embattled pick for defense secretary, but some Trump transition officials are beginning to doubt whether the Fox News host can survive the controversy.”
“According to two Republicans close to Trump, the transition team is quietly preparing a list of alternative defense secretary candidates should Trump abandon Hegseth. ‘It’s becoming a real possibility,’ one of the sources says. The second source tells me that transition members are frustrated that Hegseth failed to disclose he had paid a financial settlement to a woman who alleged he raped her at a Republican women’s event in 2017.”
Said one source: “People are upset about the distraction. The general feeling is Pete hasn’t been honest.”
“Republican senators expressed frustration Tuesday with their colleagues who’ve been skipping Senate votes, arguing it effectively neutralizes their strategy to slow-walk or even potentially defeat President Joe Biden’s judicial nominees during the lame-duck session,” Punchbowl News reports.
“At a closed-door lunch, GOP senators took particular aim at Vice President-elect JD Vance and Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL), according to three attendees. Vance has been absent since he was named as President-elect Donald Trump’s running mate over the summer, which is customary. Rubio hasn’t voted since his nomination for secretary of State was made official last week.”
Trump transition co-chair Linda McMahon is expected to be named as secretary of the Department of Education, CNN reports.
“In the end zone, on the soccer pitch and on the golf course, athletes are paying tribute to President-elect Trump with the ‘Trump Dance,'” Axios reports.
“The moves are inspired by a dance Trump has been doing at his rallies for years — pumping his fists and shaking his hips.”
A new NBC News analysis of precinct-level data shows the extent to which President-elect Donald Trump’s wins in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania — and Vice President Kamala Harris’s losses — were driven by weak turnout in heavily Democratic cities.
“We do have a history, but I don’t have any bitterness. I don’t hold anything against him. No hard feelings or anything. I’d have a beer with the dude. Whatever. That’s the game.”
— Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA), quoted by NOTUS, on his willingness to vote for confirm Dr. Mehmet Oz (R) to oversee Medicare.
“Progressive media outlets are trying to curry favor with President-elect Trump, ruffling the feathers of their audiences,” Axios reports.
“Resistance media benefited enormously from outrage engagement during Trump’s first term, but the dynamics are different now.”
“Frustrated by the mainstream media’s coverage of President Biden’s age and its false sense of optimism behind Vice President Harris’ campaign, viewers are more skeptical today of the media’s resistance posturing.”
Rep. Lori Chavez-DeRemer (R-OR) — who lost her re-election bid earlier this month — is in the mix to be Donald Trump’s Labor secretary and, notably, has the backing of Teamsters President Sean O’Brien, Politico reports.
“As Republicans circle the wagons around Matt Gaetz and his nomination to be attorney general, Donald Trump and his surrogates have started calling GOP senators to feel them out on the confirmation battle,” NOTUS reports.
“The calls are not going well.”
“According to three sources familiar with the conversations, Trump and his team are receiving an overwhelmingly negative reaction with regard to Gaetz. One of the sources told NOTUS that multiple senators have even told Trump and his team they won’t be voting to confirm.”
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Israel will pay $5 million to any Gaza resident who returns a hostage plus safe passage out of the war-ravaged territory, Bloomberg reports.
“President-elect Donald Trump has announced that he intends to nominate Dr. Mehmet Oz to serve as the administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services,” the New York Times reports.
Trump said that Oz would “work closely with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to take on the illness industrial complex.”
“President-elect Donald Trump’s plans to end business-as-usual at the Justice Department apparently include replacing FBI Director Christopher Wray, Vice President-elect JD Vance indicated in a social media post on Tuesday,” Politico reports.
“Vance revealed he and the president-elect were conducting interviews for the crucial FBI post in a since-deleted post on X.”
“Fresh from a devastating loss to Donald Trump, Vice President Kamala Harris may now head to Capitol Hill to defy him in what could be her last major act in office,” NBC News reports.
“As President Joe Biden attempts to advance a crush of judicial confirmations before he leaves the White House, Democrats are bracing for the possibility of close calls in the process as they ambitiously seek to top the 234 judges Trump secured during his first term.”
“That’s where Harris would come in. As the president of the Senate, Harris wields the constitutional power to provide a tie-breaking vote.”
Taegan Goddard is the founder of Political Wire, one of the earliest and most influential political web sites. He also runs Political Job Hunt, Electoral Vote Map and the Political Dictionary.
Goddard spent more than a decade as managing director and chief operating officer of a prominent investment firm in New York City. Previously, he was a policy adviser to a U.S. Senator and Governor.
Goddard is also co-author of You Won - Now What? (Scribner, 1998), a political management book hailed by prominent journalists and politicians from both parties. In addition, Goddard's essays on politics and public policy have appeared in dozens of newspapers across the country.
Goddard earned degrees from Vassar College and Harvard University. He lives in New York with his wife and three sons.
Goddard is the owner of Goddard Media LLC.
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