TRUMP REGIME

Trump appointees with Project 2025 links

AP -  Matt Gaetz has withdrawn as President-elect Donald Trump’s pick for attorney general following scrutiny over a federal sex trafficking investigation. 

Washington Post -Trump has won the presidency and is assembling an administration that includes some picks for key positions that stand in stark contrast to his repeated efforts to distance himself from Project 2025.

The most striking example would be Russ Vought, whom Trump is leaning toward appointing to lead the White House budget office. Vought, who held the same role during Trump’s first term, was an architect of Project 2025, writing a chapter on the executive office — and advocating that the next president more aggressively wield his power.

Trump has named at least four other nominees who are credited by name in Project 2025, a product of the conservative Heritage Foundation: Tom Homan, Trump’s pick for “border czar”; John Ratcliffe, Trump’s planned nominee for CIA director; Brendan Carr, his selection to head the Federal Communications Commission; and Pete Hoekstra, Trump’s selection for ambassador to Canada. Homan, Hoekstra and Ratcliffe were listed as contributors to Project 2025’s 900-plus-page manifesto. Carr wrote an entire chapter on the agency that Trump now wants him to run.

One of the groups that advised Project 2025, America First Legal, is led by Stephen Miller, a former top Trump aide whom Trump has now picked to return to the White House as assistant to the president, deputy chief of staff for policy and homeland security adviser.

Washington Post - Matt Gaetz paid two women $10,000 in part for sex, a House panel was told.  Trump’s attorney general pick paid the women between 2017 and 2019, records showed. Yesterday, the House Ethics panel declined to release its report on Gaetz.

NPR  - President-elect Donald Trump has picked Matthew Whitaker, who has no foreign policy experience, to represent America’s interests as his ambassador to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Whitaker worked in the Justice Department during Trump’s first presidential term, initially as chief of staff to Attorney General Jeff Sessions and then briefly as acting attorney general. NATO is one of the many national and global institutions Trump has criticized over the years. He has argued that the U.S. was shouldering an oversized burden while European allies failed to pay their fair share. 

YES! - Today the United States House of Representatives is expected to vote for a second time on a bill that would grant the secretary of the treasury the power to revoke the tax-exempt status of any nonprofit it deems a “terrorist supporting organization.” This bill is dangerous. It could be used to target organizations like YES! that speak truth to power, challenge the status quo, and provide a platform for marginalized voices—including Palestinian and Jewish communities. Last week, the bill was blocked by a narrow margin, but today, it only needs a simple majority to pass.

Dirt Diggers Digest - Health insurance policy was not a major topic during a presidential campaign dominated by talk of immigration, inflation, reproductive rights, and threats to democracy. The issue’s main appearance was during the September debate, when Trump made his much-ridiculed remark about having “concepts of a plan” to replace the Affordable Care Act.

Now it turns out that Republicans have chosen healthcare as one of their priority issues as they prepare to assume full control of Congress. The Washington Post reports that GOP lawmakers and Trump advisers are discussing significant cuts in Medicaid—both the traditional part of the program designed to provide coverage for those in poverty as well as the expansion to middle income families that made up part of Obamacare.

NBC News -  A woman told police she was sexually assaulted by a man she identified as Pete Hegseth, President-elect Donald Trump's nominee for defense secretary, in 2017, according to official records of a police investigation released in California. Hegseth, who was not charged, said the encounter was consensual and denies any wrongdoing.