Mike Pence, Joe Rogan, tech CEOs attend Trump’s inauguration
Julia Demaree Nikhinson/AP Photo/Bloomberg via Getty Images
(WASHINGTON) — As President Donald Trump was sworn in for his second term, a long list of political leaders, tech CEOs, celebrities and others were in attendance in the U.S. Capitol.
Former Vice President Mike Pence was seen in the Rotunda, as well as former President Barack Obama, former President Bill Clinton and former first lady Hillary Clinton. Former President George W. Bush and former first lady Laura Bush were also there.
Former first lady Michelle Obama — who has attended every inauguration since 2009, including Trump’s first swearing-in ceremony in 2017 — was not present.
Former President Joe Biden and first lady Jill Biden, as well as former Vice President Kamala Harris and second gentleman Doug Emhoff, were in attendance.
Several major tech CEOs were also there, including Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg and Tim Cook. Joe Rogan, whose podcast Trump appeared on during the campaign, was seen in the Rotunda.
Chinese Vice President Han Zheng was also attending the event.
Many GOP leaders were seen in the Capitol, including former Republican leader Sen. Mitch McConnell, former U.S. Speaker of the House John Boehner, Sen. Marco Rubio, North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum and Sen. Tom Cotton.
Numerous Democrats were also present, including New York Mayor Eric Adams, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker and Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar.
Spotted in the Emancipation Hall overflow room were YouTube celebs Jake and Logan Paul, UFC fighter Conor McGregor and podcaster Theo Von.
(WASHINGTON) — A growing number of senators have privately signaled that they are not inclined to vote to confirm Pete Hegseth as President-elect Donald Trump’s next defense secretary, leading Trump’s advisers to begin discussing who may be a viable replacement, sources familiar with the matter told ABC News.
Sources tell ABC News that at least six senators have privately indicated that they don’t intend to vote for Hegseth amid the growing allegations about his mistreatment of women.
While Trump and his advisers have privately said the president-elect backs Hegseth and wants him to “keep fighting,” sources familiar with private discussions tell ABC News that a growing list of replacements is emerging to replace him. Those include Iowa Sen. Joni Ernst, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, Tennessee Sen. Bill Hagerty and Florida Rep. Mike Waltz, whom Trump has already tapped to be national security adviser.
Sources close to DeSantis say he has expressed interest in the role. He was seen today with Trump attending a memorial service for three Palm Beach County sheriff’s deputies in West Palm Beach, who were killed in a crash last month.
Reached by ABC News, a spokesperson for the Trump transition team declined to comment.
Hegseth was back on Capitol Hill Tuesday looking to shore up support as he fends off the allegations of misconduct and sexual impropriety.
The visit came after a report in The New Yorker that Hegseth was forced to step down from two veteran nonprofit groups — Veterans for Freedom and Concerned Veterans for America — amid accusations of financial mismanagement, sexist behavior and other disqualifying behavior.
ABC News has not independently confirmed the magazine’s account. Hegseth’s attorney, Tim Parlatore, told The New Yorker the claims were “outlandish.”
Former Trump White House chief strategist Steve Bannon said in an exclusive interview on ABC News’ “This Week” Sunday that tech billionaires’ planned attendance at Monday’s inauguration is a sign of their “official surrender” to President-elect Donald Trump.
“As soon as [Mark] Zuckerberg said, ‘I’ve been invited. I’m going,’ the floodgates opened up and they were all there knocking, trying to be supplicants. So I look at this and I think most people in our movement look at this as President Trump broke the oligarchs, he broke them and they surrendered,” Bannon told “This Week” co-anchor Jonathan Karl.
Meta’s Zuckerberg and Amazon boss Jeff Bezos are among the tech executives set to appear at the inauguration, alongside close Trump ally Elon Musk, the world’s richest man. Meta and Amazon are just two of the tech giants who have given money to President-Elect Trump’s inaugural fund.
In the wake of Trump’s victory in November a handful of tech’s most powerful executives have made trips to Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home in Florida for meetings with the president-elect. But despite the show of support, Bannon remains skeptical of their allegiance to Trump and the MAGA movement, specifically citing Zuckerberg’s recent alignment with the right.
“Zuckerberg’s, you know, road to Damascus came a little late. It was after the Fifth of November,” Bannon told Karl. “It’s very, you know, now wants to be a bro. He Kung Fu fights. He’s going to UFC. He’s got his hair done differently. He’s, he’s cut. That doesn’t hack it with me. That guy will flip on President Trump and he’ll flip on us in the second. When it’s convenient for him. He will flip.”
Meta declined to comment on Bannon’s remarks.
Bannon, a stalwart of the MAGA movement and major influence in Trump’s sphere during the early days of his first administration, has been one of the strongest supporters of the 45th president throughout his political career.
He frequently echoed Trump’s false claims of election fraud in the 2020 presidential election and served four months in prison after defying a subpoena from the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 Capitol riot.
During his interview with Karl, Bannon insisted that Trump’s message during Monday’s inaugural address will be less dark than the first time around.
“I think he’s going to try to unify the country around a course of action that we have to take, I think he’ll lay out the challenges, and he’ll lay out the beginning in some sort of 65-, 60,000-foot level — what his policies and proposals are. But I think it’ll all be about unifying the country and going forward together.”
Bannon cited the broad coalition that led to Trump’s return to the White House as a reason for the shift in tone.
“It’s a whole ecosystem … You have working-class African Americans. You have South Texas in the Rio Grande Valley, people are now prepared not just to stop voting for Democrats, but to vote for him.”
Bannon, told Karl that Trump has the ability to hold that wide-ranging coalition together like few other figures in American history.
“If you had to have somebody to do it, he’s the guy to do it,” Bannon said. “That’s why he is at the level of Washington and Lincoln.”
(WASHINGTON) — Pete Hegseth told senators on the committee investigating his qualifications to be secretary of defense on Tuesday that “restrictive rules of engagement” have “made it more difficult to defeat our enemies” as Democrats on the panel suggested he undervalued the laws of war.
Hegseth, President-elect Donald Trump’s pick to lead the Department of Defense, told Sen. Jack Reed, the top Democrat on the committee, that it would be his priority “that lawyers aren’t the ones getting in the way” of military effectiveness.
Reed said Hegseth’s advocacy for pardons for convicted war criminals when he was a Fox News host raised questions about his respect for the military judicial process as the members of the committee questioned the nominee.
Reed referenced three acts of clemency Trump took at the end of his first administration and for which Hegseth made a public case for, including two convictions by courts martial, saying that in “two of these cases, the military personnel who served in combat with these convicted service members were not supportive of the pardons.”
“They did their duty as soldiers to report war crimes,” Reed said. “Your definition of lethality seems to embrace those people who do commit war crimes, rather than those who stand up and say, ‘This is not right.'”
Shortly before Trump’s pardons in November 2019, Hegseth said the president could take “imminent action” on the convictions of Army Lt. Clint Lorance and Green Beret Maj. Matt Golsteyn for war crimes and the demotion in rank of Navy SEAL Eddie Gallagher, who was acquitted of killing a wounded Islamic State captive but sentenced to four months confinement and a reduction in rank for posing with a corpse during a 2017 deployment to Iraq.
“I’ve thought very deeply about the balance between legality and lethality,” Hegseth told Reed in Wednesday’s confirmation hearing, “ensuring that the men and women on the frontlines have the opportunity to destroy…the enemy, and that lawyers aren’t the ones getting in the way.”
Pressed later by independent Sen. Angus King, Hegseth agreed that the Geneva Convention was the “law of the land,” but that such laws of war existed “above reality” and there was a “tactical distinction” between international laws and fighting on the ground.
“By the time it trickles down to a company or a platoon or a squad level, you have a rules of engagement that nobody recognizes. And then it makes you incredibly difficult to actually do your job on the battlefield,” the combat veteran said.
“We follow rules. But we don’t need burdensome rules of engagement [that] make it impossible for us to win these wars,” he said.
Reed, also an Army veteran, asked Hegseth, “You’ve already disparaged in writing the Geneva Convention, the rules of law, all of these things. How you be able to effectively lead a military in which one of the principal elements is discipline, respect for lawful authority?”
The senator also demanded a derogatory term Hegseth used to describe Army lawyers in the Judge Advocate General’s Corps, or JAGs, whom he called “jagoffs” in his book “War on Warriors.” “No infantrymen like Army lawyers,” Hegseth wrote at the time.
Hegseth first refused to elaborate when asked, but, pressed a second time by Reed, offered the term referred to “a JAG officer who puts his or her own priorities in front of the warfighters, their promotions, their medals, in front of having the backs of those are making the tough calls on the front lines. Reed replied sarcastically, “Interesting.”
Hegseth acknowledged that the Uniform Code of Military Justice is formed by “laws … set by Congress” when Sen. Elissa Slotkin asked if he’d seek to change them.
Slotkin noted Sen. Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican, was a “JAG officer for most of his life.”
Hegseth said he was only “speaking about particular JAG officers I’ve had to deal with” in his earlier writing.
