Tulsi Gabbard, Kash Patel and more Trump picks make the rounds on Capitol Hill
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(WASHINGTON) — President-elect Donald Trump’s picks for defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, and director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, are continuing to try to shore up support with senators ahead of confirmation hearings next month.
Gabbard will meet with incoming Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., on Thursday. She is also expected to meet with GOP Sen. Bill Hagerty, a member of the Senate Judiciary and Foreign Relations Committees.
This is Gabbard’s first week making the rounds on Capitol Hill since being tapped by Trump to oversee a sprawling network of 18 agencies in his new administration, despite her inexperience in the intelligence field.
A former Democratic congresswoman and member of the National Guard, Gabbard has face scrutiny for 2017 meetings with Syria’s authoritarian leader Bashar Assad (whose regime was toppled this week) and for controversial views on Russia.
Trump remarked on Gabbard, and his other Cabinet picks, during his interview with Time for the magazine’s “Person of the Year” honor. The interview was conducted on Nov. 25.
Trump said he was surprised by the criticism of Gabbard.
“I mean, I think she’s a great American,” he said. “I think she’s a person with tremendous common sense. I’ve watched her for years, and she has nothing to do with Russia. This is another, you know, a mini Russia, Russia, Russia scam.”
When asked if he’d rethink her possible appointment if foreign allies began withholding intelligence, Trump said, “I think probably, if that’s what’s happening. No, I don’t see it. Certainly, if something can be shown to me.”
Hegseth, another embattled Trump pick, is also back on Thursday to meet with senators, including Kentucky Republican Rand Paul. Notably, he’s also expected to meet with Democrat Sen. John Fetterman, the first to meet with him.
Hegseth’s faced pushback amid allegations of sexual impropriety, public drunkenness and other misconduct — which he’s largely denied. But this week, it appeared he was gaining some Republican support.
Trump’s doubled down on support for Hegseth, and pressure from his MAGA allies on potential GOP skeptics has shown early signs of paying off.
Kash Patel, Trump’s pick to lead the FBI, was also spotted back in the Senate hallways on Thursday.
Trump, in the Time interview, was pressed on if he was still considering recess appointments to install his Cabinet picks. Recess appointments would bypass the Senate’s constitutionally-mandated “advice and consent” role regarding Cabinet officials. Trump made a demand that whoever leads the Senate Republican Conference in the new Congress be open to them.
“I really don’t care how they get them approved, as long as they get them approved,” Trump said.
“But I think I have a very good relationship with Senator Thune and the others, all of them. I think almost, almost everybody, many of them I was very instrumental in getting, if not this season, last season, the season before that, I would say more than half,” Trump added.
So far, one of Trump’s pick faced insurmountable opposition.
Former Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz, also accused of sexual misconduct, was Trump’s first pick for attorney general. Gaetz withdrew his name from consideration as opposition mounted to his selection.
Trump was asked by Time what he’d do if the Senate balked at any more of his choices.
“Well, I don’t think they will,” he said. He said he told Gaetz, “You know, Matt, I don’t think this is worth the fight.”
(WASHINGTON) — President Donald Trump kicked off his second term with a flurry of executive actions on immigration, Jan. 6, health policy and more.
More orders are expected Tuesday amid fallout from his first moves, including his issuing pardons for more than a thousand rioters convicted in connection with the violent Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol and his effort to end birthright citizenship.
Meanwhile, lawmakers will continue to question and process the president’s Cabinet picks. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has been sworn in as other nominees, including Elise Stefanik for ambassador to the United Nations, face confirmation hearings.
‘For us and the whole world, it is still the Gulf of Mexico’: Mexican president
Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum responded to Trump’s various decrees issued after the inauguration in a point-by-point statement.
Sheinbaum said Trump’s decrees concerning the emergency zone of the southern border and the Migrant Protection Protocols were no different than the orders made during Trump’s first term.
“We will always act in the defence of our independence, the defense of our fellow nationals living in the U.S. We act within the framework of our constitution and laws. We always act with a cool head,” she said in her statement.
Sheinbaum however pushed back on Trump’s decree to rename the Gulf of Mexico.
“For us and the whole world, it is still the Gulf of Mexico,” she said.
-ABC News’ Anne Laurent and Will Gretsky
Rubio promises State Department will focus on making America ‘stronger,’ safer,’ and ‘more prosperous’
After being sworn in as the nation’s 72nd secretary of state, Marco Rubio promised that every action taken by the department would be determined by the answer to three questions: “Does it make us stronger? Does it make us safer? And does it make us more prosperous?”
Rubio gave remarks in Spanish as well, giving thanks to God, his family present and not present, including his parents, who he said came to the U.S. in 1956 — and that the purpose of their lives was that their children could realize dreams not possible for them.
“It’s an incredible honor to be the secretary of state of the most powerful, best country in the world,” he continued in Spanish, giving thanks to Trump for the opportunity.
Rubio also echoed themes from Trump’s inaugural address and reiterated the president’s agenda.
“As far as the task ahead, President Trump was elected to keep promises. And he is going to keep those promises. And his primary promise when it comes to foreign policy is that the priority of the United States Department of State will be the United States. It will be furthering the national interest of this country,” Rubio said.
– ABC News’ Shannon Kingston
Confirmation hearing begins for Trump’s VA pick
Doug Collins, Trump’s choice to lead the Veterans Affairs Department, will face questions from lawmakers as his confirmation hearing gets underway.
Collins, a former congressman, is a Navy veteran who currently serves as a chaplain in the U.S. Air Force Reserve Command.
He was the top Republican on the House Judiciary Committee during Trump’s first impeachment, and had defended the president.
Rubio is sworn in by JD Vance as secretary of state
After being unanimously confirmed by the Senate on Monday night, Secretary of State Marco Rubio was officially sworn in by Vice President JD Vance on Tuesday morning.
Rubio joined ABC’s “Good Morning America” ahead of the ceremony, where he discussed Trump’s pardons for Jan. 6 rioters, TikTok and the Russia-Ukraine war.
Rubio sidestepped directly weighing on the pardons, saying his “focus needs to be 100% on how I interact with our counterparts, our adversaries, our potential enemies around the world to keep this country safe, to make it prosperous.”
When asked about Trump’s campaign pledge to end the conflict between Russia and Ukraine on Day 1, Rubio contended the matter is more complex and that negotiations would not be played out in public.
“Look this is a complex, tragic conflict, one that was started by Vladimir Putin that’s inflicted a tremendous amount of damage on Ukraine and also on Russia, I would argue, but also on the stability of Europe,” Rubio said. “So the only way to solve these things, we got to get back to pragmatism, but we also get back to seriousness here, and that is the hard work of diplomacy. The U.S. has a role to play here. We’ve been supportive of Ukraine, but this conflict has to end.”
White House signals Trump will make announcement on infrastructure
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said this morning that Trump will be making a a major announcement on infrastructure at 4 p.m. ET.
“I can confirm that the American people won’t be hearing from me today,” she wrote, indicating she would not hold a press briefing. “They’ll be hearing from the leader of the free world,” Leavitt said during an appearance on “Fox & Friends.”
“Once again, President Trump will be speaking to the press later this afternoon at the White House, and we will have a big infrastructure announcement,” she added.
(WASHINGTON) — Outgoing Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas, who for four years has been a target for Republican criticism, said that national tragedies should not be used for “political disagreements.”
“There are people that lobby vitriol in public, and have relationships in private, that are quite inconsistent with the vitriol,” he told ABC News in an exit interview from his office at DHS headquarters in Washington.
“Times of tragedy should drive unity of effort and unity of care, whether that be the hurricanes and tornadoes of Helene and Milton, or whether that be the wildfires in California, or whether that be the tragic death of 14 individuals on in the early morning hours of January 1, and not be ammunition for political disagreement,” he said. “We’ve got to get back to a place where we can disagree and we can unify when the American people need it.”
He said his hope is that “we can disagree with civility and mutual respect.”
Mayorkas’ time as DHS secretary saw one crisis after another, including big increases in migrants crossing the southern border illegally to an unprecedented threat environment to an evolving cybersecurity landscape.
Through it all, he said remains proud of the department’s work.
“I am on the ground with the people of this department in in times of success, in times of tragedy,” Mayorkas said.
He personally traveled to funerals for Border Patrol agents who died in the line of duty, recalling how at one he was moved by the outpouring of honor and respect.
“… along the highway in Texas,” he said, “one saw police officers, firefighters, citizens standing outside of their cars at bus stops all along the multi-mile stretch of highway, saluting the car and the motorcade. Incredibly powerful message of the impact of our work and the impact of people doing the work on the broader community.”
For Mayorkas, who spent 11 years working at DHS, serving as secretary was the honor of a lifetime.
“I love this job. I love the mission. I love the people who perform it, and it’s going to be very hard to leave,” he said.
Regrets, he said, are “unproductive.”
“If I said no, there’s nothing we could have done better, I would be basically saying that we achieved perfection, and that obviously is not the case,” he said. “In any large, multifaceted organization such as an administration, there are disagreements over policy and practice, and decisions are made, and then we all march as one in executing.”
He maintained he is leaving DHS in better shape than how he found it, and, he insists, that starts with the border.
“We have built and delivered a model where the border is more secure now than it was in 2019 and we have safe, lawful and orderly pathways that have delivered humanitarian relief to people in need and cutting out the smugglers, we have modernized the system of border security and humanitarian relief in unprecedented ways,” he says of the department’s work, noting the border has seen the lowest daily average of migrants in December since July 2020.
Mayorkas said that the incoming Trump administration’s critical rhetoric “misses everything that we have tried to do, and I view it as rhetoric that is a political and not substantive.”
“For example, they speak of focusing on public safety and national security threats when they talk about mass deportations,” he said. “Well, they speak of it as something new, when in fact, that is a continuation of precisely what we’ve done.”
Mayorkas also said that the incoming administration will have access to “tools at their disposal that were not tools that we had at our disposal,” meaning potentially increased funding from Congress.
In June 2024, President Joe Biden signed a series of executive actions on the border, that DHS says curbed illegal immigration by nearly 55%.
When asked by ABC News why the Biden administration didn’t act sooner to take the actions that President Joe Biden ordered in June 2024, during the presidential campaign, he said there was “bipartisan pressure” to not lift the order established by then-President Donald Trump to curb migrants at the border due to a public health emergency, known as Title 42.
“Everyone expected that when we lifted it, calamity would ensue, 18,000 encounters, 20,000 encounters in a day, from on both sides of the aisle and that calamity did not occur,” he said. “And then we turned to Congress for funding, more ICE officers, more Border Patrol agents, more Office of Field Operations personnel, more immigration judges denied. We went to Congress again, again, denied. We entered the bipartisan Senate negotiations, mission accomplished, political torpedo, no legislative reform,” he said, noting how how then-candidate Donald Trump told congressional Republicans to block the measure. “And then the president acted,” he said of President Biden.
Mayorkas also became the first Cabinet-level secretary to be impeached because, after House Republicans claimed his failed to handle the immigration issue.
“It should never have occurred. And I wish that the members of Congress had followed the law, and if they had, it would not have occurred,” he said. “And it’s unfortunate when the law is overridden by politics.”
He also said the country is in a “heightened threat environment,” and to look no further than what happened on January 1st in New Orleans as an example.
Mayorkas said that the department under his watch is helping state and local governments take a public health approach to stopping mass attacks.
“If one takes a look at the assailant in Buffalo, the assailant in Uvalde, Texas, the assailant at the July 4 parade outside, in a suburb outside of Chicago, those three assailants exhibited signs manifested externally, signs of radicalizing to violence for different reasons,” he said, adding if someone notices them, the assailant can get help.
Mayorkas said he also has focused on positioning DHS to take on the challenge posed by artificial intelligence by personally recruiting people to come work on the issue and setting up the AI Safety Board — a collection of private and public partners who help shape the department’s AI policy.
The DHS secretary oversees 22 agencies with more than 260,000 employees – on issues ranging from the border to federal disaster management to the Secret Service.
He said that he wishes he could stay on to see reforms being made to the Secret Service after the assassination attempt on Donald Trump in July, which he described as an agency “failure.”
“Let me be clear, I consider the Secret Service to be the best protective service in the world. Success is when nothing occurs, and there are countless examples of that success,” he said.
Mayorkas, who said he plans to stay on the job until Monday at noon, told ABC News he has had “substantive and very productive and very collegial” conversations with Trump’s pick to be the new DHS secretary, South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem.
(LONDON) — World leaders and top officials reacted to the unfolding results of the 2024 presidential election as the contest drew to a conclusion.
With former President Donald Trump significantly ahead of Vice President Kamala Harris in the race for the White House and claiming victory, French President Emmanuel Macron offered his congratulations to Trump in post to X.
“Ready to work together as we have done for four years,” Macron said, referring to Trump’s first term. “With your convictions and with mine. With respect and ambition. For more peace and prosperity.”
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu congratulated both Trump and his wife, Melania. “Congratulations on history’s greatest comeback,” Netanyahu wrote on X. “Your historic return to the White House offers a new beginning for America and a powerful recommitment to the great alliance between Israel and America.”
“This is a huge victory,” Netanyahu added.
Israeli President Isaac Herzog, newly-appointed Defense Minister Israel Katz and Foreign Minister Gideon Saar also all offered their congratulations.
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, meanwhile, also congratulated Trump and wished him success in a statement, saying: “We will remain steadfast in our commitment to peace, and we are confident that the United States will support, under your leadership, the legitimate aspirations of the Palestinian people.”
Iranian government spokesperson Fatemeh Mohajerani said during a press conference that his country is “not too worried about Trump being elected” because “there was not much difference between” the two candidates.
“From our point of view, it does not make any difference and the budget that has been considered and the measures that were foreseen for the economic security of the country, the necessary forecasts have been made and there is no reason to worry,” Mohajerani added. “Sanctions have greatly strengthened our internal strength and we have the ability to deal with them.”
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban — a longtime conservative ally of Trump — posted to X early Wednesday celebrating what he called “the biggest comeback in U.S. political history.” Orban congratulated Trump on “his enormous win,” which he described as a “much needed victory for the world.”
Hungarian Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto wrote on Facebook of his hope that “Hungarian-American political cooperation will return to its peak form, because we have similar thoughts about peace, illegal immigration and protection of families.”
“And there is a better chance than ever before that there will be peace in Ukraine after almost a thousand days,” Szijjarto added.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy lauded what he called Trump’s “impressive election victory.” He wrote in a post on X that leaders in Kyiv “look forward to an era of a strong United States of America under President Trump’s decisive leadership. We rely on continued strong bipartisan support for Ukraine in the United States.”
“I appreciate President Trump’s commitment to the ‘peace through strength’ approach in global affairs,” Zelenskyy added. “This is exactly the principle that can practically bring just peace in Ukraine closer. I am hopeful that we will put it into action together.”
When asked about the election results on Wednesday, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s spokesperson Dmitry Peskov told reporters he was “not aware of the president’s plans to congratulate Trump.” Peskov added: “Let’s not forget that we are talking about the unfriendly country that is both directly and indirectly involved in a war against our state.”
Russian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova, meanwhile, posted to X with a video of Harris reciting a psalm during the campaign. “Weeping may endure for a night, but joy comes in the morning,” Harris said in the video. Zakharova wrote, “Hallelujah, I’ll add on my own.”
In a later post, Zakharova said, “Those who live by love for their country, and not by hatred for others, win.”
The Foreign Ministry issued a standalone statement Wednesday saying the country “will work with the new administration when it ‘settles’ in the White House, firmly defending Russia’s national interests and focusing on achieving all the goals of the special military operation. Our conditions are unchanged and well known in Washington.”
Former Russian President and Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev wrote on Telegram that Trump “has one quality that is useful for us: as a businessman to the core, he mortally dislikes spending money on various hangers-on” and “idiotic allies,” suggesting his election may be a curb on American aid to Ukraine.
“The question is how much will Trump be forced to give for the war,” Medvedev — who is now the deputy chairman of Russia’s Security Council — wrote. “He is stubborn, but the system is stronger.”
Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko — one of Russia’s closest allies — said during a press conference that Trump is “an ardent capitalist who won the U.S. elections” while “all of Europe,” including Belarus, “is oriented toward socialism.”
NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte said Trump’s leadership “will again be key to keeping our alliance strong.” He added, “I look forward to working with him again to advance peace through strength through NATO.”
Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, wrote on social media, “I warmly congratulate Donald J. Trump.”
“The EU and the U.S. are more than just allies,” she added. “We are bound by a true partnership between our people, uniting 800 million citizens. So let’s work together on a strong transatlantic agenda that keeps delivering for them.”
British Prime Minister Keir Starmer in a statement congratulated Trump on a “historic election victory.” He added: “I look forward to working with you in the years ahead. As the closest of allies, we stand shoulder to shoulder in defense of our shared values of freedom, democracy and enterprise.
Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni wrote on X, “Good work Mr. President.”
“Italy and the United States are ‘sister’ nations, linked by an unshakable alliance, common values and a historic friendship,” she wrote. “It is a strategic bond, which I am sure we will now strengthen even further.”
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan described Trump as a “friend” in his congratulatory post to X.
“I hope that Turkey-U.S. relations will strengthen, that regional and global crises and wars, especially the Palestinian issue and the Russia-Ukraine war, will come to an end,” Erdogan said.
Polish President Andrzej Duda posted on X to Trump: “You made it happen!”
Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic posted a photograph of himself standing with Trump in the Oval Office, writing alongside it: “Together we face the serious challenges ahead. Serbia is committed to cooperation with the USA on stability, prosperity and peace.”
The leaders of both India and Pakistan were quick to offer their best wishes. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi wrote: “As you build on the successes of your previous term, I look forward to renewing our collaboration to further strengthen the India-U.S. Comprehensive Global and Strategic Partnership. Together, let’s work for the betterment of our people and to promote global peace, stability and prosperity.”
Across the border in Pakistan, Prime Minister Shahbaz Sharif said he is looking “forward to working closely with the incoming administration to further strengthen and broaden the Pakistan-U.S. partnership.”
South Korean President Yoon Suk-Yeol also tweeted a congratulatory message. “Under your strong leadership, the future of the [Republic of Korea]-U.S. alliance and America will shine brighter,” he said. “Look forward to working closely with you.”
Taiwanese President Lai Ching-te congratulated Trump and also thanked President Joe Biden and Harris “for their firm support for Taiwan during their term in office,” according to a statement from the Taiwanese Presidential Office.
“No matter which political party has been in power, Taiwan-U.S. relations have not only become stronger but also continued to progress and deepen,” the office added. “Building on the existing foundation, we will work hand in hand with the new U.S. administration and Congress to create a new situation in Taiwan-U.S. relations.”
ABC News’ Tom Soufi Burridge, Bruno Nota, Morgan Winsor, Habibullah Khan and Joohee Cho contributed to this article.
