Trump calls Biden’s letter to him ‘very nice,’ says may make letter public
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(WASHINGTON) — President Donald Trump says he has opened the letter former President Joe Biden left for him in Resolute Desk in the Oval Office, calling it “very nice” and suggesting he might make it public.
“Just basically, it was a little bit of an inspirational type of letter, you know? ‘Joy, do a good job. Important, very important, how important the job is.’ But I may, I think it was a nice letter. I think I should let people see it, because it was a positive for him, in writing it, I appreciated the letter,” Trump told reporters Tuesday evening.
Trump appeared to discover the letter Biden left for him on Monday evening in the Oval Office when speaking with reporters.
When one asked whether he’d found the letter, Trump opened the drawer of the desk and found the letter, apparently for the first time. It was in a small white envelope with “47” written on the front and underlined.
“It could have been years before we found this thing. Wow, thank you,” Trump said.
Biden continued the tradition of leaving a letter for his successor — one Trump continued in 2020 when he left after his first term, turning over the office to Biden.
Trump also reflected on his return to the Oval Office, when asked by ABC News about how it felt to be back in the White House.
“What a great feeling, one of the better feelings I’ve ever had,” Trump said.
Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo, President of Mexico, speaks during the National Agreement for the Human Right to Water and Sustainability, held at the Ecological Park of Xochimilco. on November 25, 2024 in Mexico City, Mexico. (Photo credit should read Carlos Santiago/ Pixelnews/Future Publishing via Getty Images)
(WASHINGTON) — President-elect Donald Trump spoke with Mexico’s President Claudia Sheinbaum on Wednesday. The call took place two days after he announced that he planned to impose a 25% tariff on all imports from Mexico on his first day in the White House.
Trump called the conversation “wonderful” and “very productive” in a post on Truth Social, saying the two leaders talked about the border control and how to combat the flow of illegal drugs — but these topical conversation points may be the only things on which the two could entirely agree.
Earlier in the day, Sheinbaum confirmed that she had spoken with Trump, and that they did discuss the shared border, writing on X: “I had an excellent conversation with President Donald Trump. We discussed Mexico’s strategy on the migration phenomenon and I shared that caravans are not arriving at the northern border because they are being taken care of in Mexico.”
But Trump went further, proclaiming that the Mexican president “agreed to stop Migration through Mexico, and into the United States, effectively closing our Southern Border.”
In a follow-up post, he added, “Mexico will stop people from going to our Southern Border, effective immediately. THIS WILL GO A LONG WAY TOWARD STOPPING THE ILLEGAL INVASION OF THE USA.”
Sheinbaum then appeared to directly contradict the president-elect’s account of the conversation, posting on X: “In our conversation with President Trump, I explained to him the comprehensive strategy that Mexico has followed to address the migration phenomenon, respecting human rights. Thanks to this, migrants and caravans are assisted before they reach the border. We reiterate that Mexico’s position is not to close borders but to build bridges between governments and between peoples.”
Trump and Sheinbaum both also concur that they spoke about stemming the flow of illegal drugs, including fentanyl, into the U.S.
Sheinbaum wrote on X that they “discussed strengthening collaboration on security issues within the framework of our sovereignty and the campaign we are carrying out in the country to prevent the consumption of fentanyl.”
And following their call, Trump announced on Truth Social that part of his plan to address the fentanyl epidemic in the U.S. will be a large advertising campaign.
“I will be working on a large scale United States Advertising Campaign, explaining how bad Fentanyl is for people to use – Millions of lives being so needlessly destroyed,” Trump wrote. “By the time the Campaign is over, everyone will know how really bad the horror of this Drug is.”
The call was arranged after Trump this week announced plans to slap tariffs on Mexico, as well as Canada and China, in an effort to stem illegal border crossings and stop the flow of drugs entering the U.S.
On Tuesday, Sheinbaum fired back, warning him not to start a trade war that she said would hurt the U.S.
“President Trump, it is not with threats nor with tariffs that migration and drug consumption in the U.S. will be dealt with,” Sheinbaum said at a press conference, reading from a letter she’d written to Trump. “These great challenges require cooperation and mutual understanding.”
She also disputed Trump’s claims about migration and drugs, and she blamed the U.S. for Mexico’s drug war — pointing to U.S. consumption and American guns.
“We don’t make guns, we don’t consume synthetic drugs. Those killed by crime to meet the demand for drugs in your country are unfortunately our responsibility,” she said.
The swift rebuke was a departure from Sheinbaum’s mentor, former President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who had a chummy relationship with Trump during his first term.
When Trump similarly threatened tariffs on Mexico and to shut the border in 2018, the two men negotiated a deal to beef up Mexican immigration enforcement with U.S. support, reducing the numbers at the border — and Trump dropped his threats.
(WASHINGTON) — Taking office at the start of the Biden administration, Rep. Nicole Malliotakis, R-N.Y., hasn’t had that much face time with a commander in chief.
On Saturday, she’ll be one of a handful of blue-state Republicans meeting with President-elect Donald Trump in Mar-a-Lago, in one of several planned strategy sessions between Trump and House Republicans this weekend, less than two weeks from his inauguration.
“It’s going to be a good discussion,” Malliotakis said Thursday.
Trump’s meetings come as Republicans debate how to best advance their policy agenda. They have spent the week debating whether to pass an energy, tax and border security package along party lines in a single package — an approach favored by House leaders and Trump — or split it up into two bills, which Senate Republicans have endorsed.
Trump hosted members of the hard-line House Freedom Caucus on Friday. Over the weekend, he will meet with other groups of lawmakers, including House GOP committee chairs, blue-state Republicans and appropriators.
House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., told reporters it was Trump’s “idea to bring in small groups of Republicans to come together and just have fellowship together, to talk about the issues and talk about the vision that we have for the year ahead of us.”
The Republican balancing act
The groups are each expected to push different priorities for the all-encompassing policy bill — from various proposed spending cuts to regional tax and policy issues that could be difficult for the GOP to fit into its legislative package.
New York Republicans plan to bring up changes to the cap on state and local tax deductions, a limit imposed in the 2017 Republican rewrite of the tax code set to expire at the end of 2025 and affects taxpayers in high-tax states such as New York, California and New Jersey. That change helped finance other tweaks the law made to the tax code.
Nearly all of the 12 Republicans who voted against Trump’s tax package came from one of those states. But now, with a one-seat majority in the House, the president-elect and Johnson can’t afford any defections.
Rep. Mike Lawler, R-N.Y., who will meet with Trump this weekend and has introduced legislation to boost the cap on the “SALT” deduction, said it’s unlikely Republicans will be able to reverse the tax provision fully.
“We will work to get the number as high as we can as part of the negotiation, but you have to look at everything in totality,” he said. “There’s a lot of factors here, as you work through it.”
Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart, R-Fla., a senior member of the House Appropriations Committee who is scheduled to meet with Trump over the weekend, said it’s important for Republicans to discuss policy as they figure out the broader strategy to move legislation through Congress.
“This is a process where you have to do everything at the same time,” he said. “There are a million different conversations about every potential issue at the same time.”
Republicans, he added, “don’t have the luxury to say, ‘I’m going to deal with that later.'”
Malliotakis, who compared the discussions and intraparty negotiations to a “Rubik’s Cube,” said she also plans to bring up other topics in the meeting, including New York City’s new congestion pricing system and how the incoming administration can challenge it.
Democrats debate approach to new administration
In the early days of the new Congress, Democrats have taken a more cautious, less resistant approach to elements of the GOP agenda following Trump’s victory and sweep of the popular vote in the presidential election.
For the first time in decades, no Democrats raised an objection to any state’s electoral votes on Jan. 6, when the vice president presided over Congress’s counting and certifying of the presidential election results.
Forty-eight Democrats voted with House Republicans this week on a bill that would require the detention of any illegal immigrant charged with “burglary, theft, larceny, or shoplifting,” and a number of Democrats supported advancing the measure in the Senate.
And 45 House Democrats supported a GOP bill to sanction the International Criminal Court in response to the ICC issuing arrest warrants for top Israeli leaders over alleged war crimes.
Centrist Rep. Pat Ryan, D-N.Y., who voted for the ICC bill but against the immigration proposal, has called for Trump to lead bipartisan negotiations over changes to the SALT deduction cap.
“I disagree with President Trump strongly on most things — to be clear, I don’t pull my punches on that or anything,” Ryan said. “But this is a tangible thing that he said he wants to do, and I’m going to take him at his word.”
ABC News’ Lauren Peller, Allison Pecorin, Katherine Faulders and Rachel Scott contributed to this report.
(WASHINGTON) — The FBI’s probe into defense secretary nominee Pete Hegseth did not include an interview with a woman who accused the former Fox News anchor of sexual assault in 2017, sources familiar with the situation told ABC News.
The top senators on the Armed Services Committee were briefed on the FBI’s background investigation last week but sources said investigators did not speak to the accuser.
A police report previously obtained by ABC News, stated that a woman — who is identified only as Jane Doe — told investigators in October 2017 that she had encountered Hegseth at an event afterparty at a California hotel where both had been drinking and claimed that he sexually assaulted her.
No charges were filed, although Hegseth subsequently paid the woman as part of a settlement agreement, which Hegseth’s attorney, Tim Parlatore, said was only because Hegseth feared his career would suffer if her allegations were made public.
The agreement stated that Hegseth made no admission of wrongdoing in the matter. Parlatore said Hegseth was the victim of “blackmail” and “false claims of sexual assault” by an unidentified woman after a Republican women’s convention in California on Oct. 7, 2017.
The circumstances around the FBI’s lack of an interview with the woman are unclear.
Hegseth has said the encounter was consensual and that he denied any wrongdoing and welcomed the FBI’s work. He wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal in December, saying that “the press is peddling anonymous story after anonymous story, all meant to smear me and tear me down.”
“It’s a textbook manufactured media takedown. They provide no evidence, no names, and they ignore the legions of people who speak on my behalf. They need to create a bogeyman, because they believe I threaten their institutional insanity,” he wrote in the op-ed at the time.
As ABC News previously reported, the FBI questioned several individuals in Hegseth’s past about his alleged extramarital affairs, his character and his relationship with alcohol.
Some witnesses contacted by the FBI did not respond, according to multiple sources familiar with background outreach and other sources briefed on the process.
The Armed Services Committee is expected to hold Hegseth’s confirmation hearing on Tuesday, ahead of President-elect Trump’s inauguration.
