Trump claims he’ll rename the Gulf of Mexico to ‘Gulf of America’
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(PALM BEACH, Fla.) — President-elect Donald Trump declared in a left-field proposal on Tuesday that his administration will rename the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America” in his latest attack on Mexico.
“We’re going to change because we do most of the work there and it’s ours,” Trump said. “It’s appropriate, and Mexico has to stop allowing millions of people to pour into our country,” Trump said in a long, winding news conference.
Trump criticized Mexico for the increase of drugs into the U.S. and said that he would make Mexico and Canada pay through “substantial tariffs.”
“We want to get along with everybody. But you know … it takes two to tango,” he said.
The gulf has been identified by several names throughout its history, with “Golfo de Mexico” first appearing on maps in the mid-16th century when Spain occupied the areas now known as Cuba to the south, Mexico to the west and the the U.S. states that surround it to the North.
It’s the ninth-largest body of water in the world and covers some 600,000 square miles.
Trump’s promise to rename the gulf isn’t the first.
In 2012, then-Mississippi State Rep. Steve Holland proposed a bill that also would have renamed the gulf into the “Gulf of America,” however the Democrat backtracked and said he was joking and using it as a way to criticize his Republican colleagues over their anti-immigrant stances.
“They are trying to really discriminate against immigrants, which offends me severely,” Holland told ABC News in 2012. “I just thought if we’re gonna get into it, we might as well all get into it, it’s purely tongue and cheek.”
Stephen Colbert suggested the same name during the 2010 BP oil spill on his Comedy Central show “The Colbert Report.”
(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.
Photo by Celal Gunes/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images
(WASHINGTON) — The White House has quietly directed the FBI to halt the background check process for dozens of President Donald Trump’s top staffers, and has transferred the process to the Pentagon, sources familiar with the matter told ABC News.
The directive came last month after agents tasked with completing the background investigations had conducted interviews with a handful of top White House aides — a standard part of the background check process.
White House officials took the unusual step of ordering a stop to the background check investigations after they deemed the process too intrusive, sources said.
The procedure typically involves extensive interviews as well as a review of financial records, foreign contacts, past employment, and any potential security risks.
The White House instead decided to transfer the background check process for White House personnel to the Department of Defense for them to complete the checks, the sources said.
A former FBI official told ABC News the approach was “highly unusual.”
“If any of this is true, and if you apply it to whatever has been historically in the remit of the FBI, then it would be breaking that historic, long-standing precedent, and highly unusual,” a former FBI official told ABC News. “It would be highly unusual if that was taken away from the FBI now, for whatever reason, and given over to the DOD or another agency.”
Newly installed FBI Director Kash Patel told ABC News in a statement, “The FBI is relentlessly focused on our mission to rebuild trust, restore law and order and let good agents be good agents — and we have full confidence DOD can address any needs in the clearance process.”
Pentagon representatives referred questions on the matter to the White House.
The background check process was halted just days before Patel was confirmed by the Senate on Feb. 20, the sources said. The FBI is still conducting background investigations for positions requiring Senate confirmation, said the sources.
The Pentagon’s Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency (DCSA) carries out the bulk of background investigations for the federal government. The FBI carries out investigations for presidential appointees that require Senate confirmation as well as some other presidential appointees, including White House staff.
Historically, administrations have relied on the FBI background check process to ensure that the personnel they are hiring meet stringent ethical standards and don’t risk compromising national security.
“Background investigations for national security positions are conducted to gather information to determine whether you are reliable, trustworthy, of good conduct and character, and loyal to the U.S.,” states the SF-86 form filled out by federal employees seeking security clearances and used for background investigations.
However Trump and many of his allies entered the White House with a bitter distrust of the bureau over what they argued was its “weaponization” through the prosecutions brought against him by former special counsel Jack Smith. His top political appointees in the opening month of the administration quickly moved to purge senior ranks of the FBI and DOJ from anyone tied to the Smith prosecutions and those they believed wouldn’t be politically loyal to Trump.
Among Trump’s first presidential actions was issuing a memorandum granting the highest level of security clearance to top White House officials who had not been fully vetted through the background check process.
That list of officials, while not publicly disclosed, included dozens of high-level White House staffers, according to sources familiar with the matter.
In that memorandum, Trump claimed there was a “backlog” in the security clearance process — an issue he blamed on President Joe Biden’s administration.
However, Trump’s transition team had refused for months to enter into an agreement with the Department of Justice under Biden to begin the background check process for individuals who would staff Trump’s incoming administration, which has contributed in part to the staffing issues they now face.
Photo by Kremlin Press Office / Handout/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images)
(WASHINGTON) — President Donald Trump‘s “trust” in Russia’s Vladimir Putin now faces a major test as the world waits for Moscow to respond to a 30-day ceasefire proposed by the U.S. and accepted by Ukraine.
Trump said after Tuesday’s breakthrough in Saudi Arabia that he would speak with Putin soon, though declined to comment on Wednesday when asked if anything had been scheduled.
“I’ve gotten some positive messages, but a positive message means nothing,” he said from the Oval Office, where he was peppered with question on what comes next. “This is a very serious situation.”
The Kremlin has cautiously said it is reviewing the proposal and it will not be pushed into anything.
The Trump administration placed significant pressure on Ukraine in recent weeks in stopping military aid and pausing some intelligence sharing — both resumed only after Ukraine agreed to the ceasefire on Tuesday.
U.S. officials, including Trump himself, have also set limited expectations amid broader negotiations on Ukraine’s borders and expressly ruled out NATO membership for the Eastern European ally.
Meanwhile, they’ve not publicly demanded any concessions from Putin — and it’s not clear how far Trump is willing to go in pressuring Russia to accept the 30-day ceasefire.
“We can, but I hope it’s not going to be necessary,” Trump said on Wednesday when asked about that very issue.
“There are things you could do that wouldn’t be pleasant in a financial sense,” he added without divulging any specifics. “I can do things financially that would be very bad for Russia. I don’t want to do that because I want to get peace.”
Trump last Friday threatened sanctions on Russia until it reached an agreement with Ukraine. The Biden administration imposed hundreds of sanctions on Moscow over the course of the conflict.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio earlier on Wednesday noted that Russia is already “pretty sanctioned up” as he was asked what pressure the administration would be ready to apply.
“As far as I am aware, the United States has not provided armaments to Russia,” Rubio said as he largely sidestepped the inquiry. “The United States is not providing assistance to Russia. Every single sanction that has been imposed on Russia remains in place … So my point being is that there’s been no steps taken to relieve any of these things, these things continue to be in place.”
“We don’t think it’s constructive for me to stand here today and begin to issue threats about what we’re going to do if Russia says no, let’s hope they say yes,” Rubio said.
Trump has also often praised his relationship with Putin, saying he knows him “very well” and declining to call him a dictator despite using the term to describe Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
“I think he wants peace. I think he would tell me if he didn’t,” Trump said of the Russian leader in mid-February. “I trust him on this subject. I think he’d like to see something happen.”
Just last week, in an interview with Fox News, Trump claimed Putin was “more generous” and easier to work with than Ukraine.
Now, the administration is saying the ball is in Russia’s court after Ukraine agreed to an immediate, monthlong stoppage in hostilities should Moscow do the same.
“We’ll see what their response is,” Rubio said. “If their response is yes, then we know we’ve made real progress and there’s a real chance of peace. If their response is no, it will be highly unfortunate and then it’ll make their intentions clear.”
ABC News’ Patrick Reevell and Kelsey Walsh contributed to this report.
