Another Trump Cabinet Pick Is in Trouble

It’s not just Matt Gaetz. The Trump transition team is worried about another set of heinous allegations tanking one of its most important Cabinet picks.

Pete Hegseth, Donald Trump Trump’s first pick for the Department of Defense, was investigated by California police over accusations of sexual assault in 2017.

The alleged assault occurred on the night of October 7 at a hotel Hegseth stayed at while attending the California Federation of Republican Women conference. The allegation to police was made five days later, according to the police report. The woman who accused Hegseth had a bruise on her right thigh.

The allegations, which were unknown to the transition team until shared via complaint, have left them scrambling. “There’s a lot of frustration around this,” an anonymous source close to the situation told The Washington Post. “He hadn’t been properly vetted.”

But on the outside, the future administration is rallying behind the Defense Department nominee. 

“President Trump is nominating high-caliber and extremely qualified candidates to serve in his Administration,” said Trump communications chief Steven Cheung. “Mr. Hegseth has vigorously denied any and all accusations, and no charges were filed. We look forward to his confirmation as United States Secretary of Defense so he can get started on Day One to Make America Safe and Great Again.” The president-elect himself has been accused of sexual assault and misconduct two dozen times over decades.

Hegseth, a military veteran and former Fox and Friends host, has also made headlines for a questionable tattoo. Hegseth was actually banned from working as a National Guardsman at President Biden’s inauguration after pictures of a tattoo on his bicep reading “Deus Vult” surfaced. Meaning “God wills it,” the term, which originated in the Crusades, has been deeply co-opted by Proud Boys, Three Percenters, and other white Christian nationalist groups. The phrase has been used by January 6 insurrectionists, the white nationalists who rioted in Charlottesville in 2017, and by the man who shot and killed 49 Muslims at a mosque in New Zealand in 2019.  

Hegseth’s own positions could certainly be described as Christian nationalist. 

“Our present moment is much like the 11th Century. We don’t want to fight, but, like our fellow Christians one thousand years ago, we must,” he wrote in his book American Crusade: Our Fight to Stay Free. “Arm yourself—metaphorically, intellectually, physically. Our fight is not with guns. Yet.”

Hegseth also despises the idea of women and trans people serving in the military, and is extremely bigoted toward Muslims. Like the sexual assault allegations, he has denied any ties to Christian nationalism, claiming on X that he is the victim of “anti-Christian bigotry.” He actually cites the inauguration banning as what made him realize the military was too “woke” for him. 

“I joined the Army in 2001 because I wanted to serve my country. Extremists attacked us on 9/11, and we went to war,” Hegseth wrote in his book The War on Warriors. “Twenty years later, I was deemed an ‘extremist’ by that very same Army … the military I loved, I fought for, I revered … spit me out.” 

The impact of these allegations, and the tattoos, on Hegseth’s Defense Department nomination remain to be seen.

Elon Musk is starting to clash with Donald Trump’s team on some of the president-elect’s key issues, especially tariffs. 

The Washington Post reports that Musk is trying to persuade Trump regarding Cabinet picks and economic policy, drawing the ire of the president-elect’s other advisers. On Saturday, Musk praised Argentine President Javier Milei in a post on X for cutting tariffs in his country. The central pillar of Trump’s economic program is raising tariffs. 

In another post later on Saturday, Musk endorsed Howard Lutnick, co-chair of Trump’s transition team and CEO of financial services firm Cantor Fitzgerald, for the post of treasury secretary over hedge fund manager Scott Bessent, who is in the running for the position. Both posts from Musk aren’t going over well with the rest of Trump’s team. 

“People are not happy,” one person in contact with campaign officials told the Post anonymously. Musk’s posts seemed to reflect that the tech CEO and world’s richest man was acting like a “co-president” and beginning to overstep his role, the person added.

Musk’s praise of Lutnick, for example, came before any public statements from the campaign or any announcements from Trump. Musk also called on his followers to weigh in with their opinion on the Cabinet position, which might send a message that he thinks Trump needs some convincing—or pressure.

There is also friction between Musk and Trump adviser Boris Epshteyn, with Axios reporting that the tech mogul thinks Epshteyn, who has pushed for appointments such as Matt Gaetz as attorney general, has too much influence over Trump’s choices. Musk has questioned the qualifications of Epshteyn’s preferred candidates, irking the longtime Trump adviser.  

These disagreements reportedly came to a head last Wednesday at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate, where Musk and Epshteyn had an angry exchange at a dinner table. Musk even accused Epshteyn of leaking details about the Trump transition to the media, which Epshteyn denied.  

If Musk gets into a turf war with other members of Trump’s team as Trump’s new presidential administration takes shape, he already has a big advantage. The tech CEO pumped hundreds of millions of dollars into Trump’s campaign, and the president-elect has already included Musk in many important meetings, as well as a phone call to Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskiy just after the election. Last week, Musk even took part in a private meeting with Iran’s ambassador to the United Nations in New York, raising questions of whether it was on Trump’s orders.   

Musk has been photographed with members of Trump’s family too, making it look like he has become part of Mar-a-Lago’s furniture and irking Trump’s advisers and staff. It seems that the world’s richest man has bought his way into Trump’s inner circle and won’t be leaving for the foreseeable future.  

Donald Trump has announced that the next Federal Communications Commission chair would be Brendan Carr, the senior-most Republican on the FCC and a contributor to Project 2025.

“Commissioner Carr is a warrior for free speech, and has fought against the regulatory lawfare that has stifled Americans’ freedoms, and held back our economy,” Trump said in a statement Sunday. The president-elect did not mention Carr’s involvement in Project 2025.

In his Project 2025 chapter, Carr outlined his agenda for the FCC. Carr wrote that one of the goals for Trump’s administration should be reining in Big Tech’s “attempts to drive diverse political viewpoints from the digital town square,” according to Business Insider. Carr suggested that companies be unable to censor content unless it is illegal, allowing consumers to choose their own content filters and fact-checking services.

Carr’s intentions for social media are perhaps best demonstrated by X, which has been transformed into a MAGA misinformation echo chamber by its owner, Elon Musk, who seems to have permanently attached himself to Trump’s side.

Carr also pushed to ban TikTok if its parent company, ByteDance, does not sell its U.S. operations, warning that Americans were receiving their news and information from China.

In addition to addressing Big Tech, Carr also wrote that the FCC should focus on “promoting national security, unleashing economic prosperity, and ensuring FCC accountability and good governance.”

House Democrats previously called for an investigation into Carr over his partisan activity, but it did not result in formal action, according to NPR. Carr said he received approval from FCC ethics officials to contribute to the right-wing playbook.

Trump spent months on the campaign trail disavowing Project 2025, an authoritarian policy road map cooked up by the right-wing think tank Heritage Foundation, only to now welcome its architects into the fold.

Last month, Carr railed against Kamala Harris’s surprise appearance on NBC’s Saturday Night Live, calling it “a clear and blatant effort to evade the FCC’s Equal Time rule” and “biased and partisan conduct.” Trump was offered equal time on NBC, and the FCC said they had “not made any determination regarding political programming rules, nor have we received a complaint from any interested parties.”

Still, Carr took up the bullhorn on behalf of the president who’d appointed him to the FCC in 2017.

FCC rules dictate that only three commissioners can be affiliated with the same political party at any given time, and none can have a financial interest in any commission-related business. The FCC is responsible for regulating interstate and international communications by radio, television, wire, satellite, and cable. Under Trump’s first administration, the FCC repealed net neutrality rules, which were then reinstated this year.

Donald Trump has sweeping plans for his second term, and they include slashing and gutting large parts of the executive branch.

Speaking with Fox News’s Maria Bartiromo on Sunday, Trump’s nominated co-chair for the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, Vivek Ramaswamy outlined the massive agenda, revealing that the plan is akin to—or possibly more extreme than—the road map offered by Project 2025. Ramaswamy proposed that several government agencies under his helm would be “deleted outright.”

“Are you expecting to close down entire agencies? Like, President Trump has talked about the Department of Education, for example. Are you going to be closing down departments?” Bartiromo asked.

“We expect mass reductions,” said Ramaswamy. “We expect certain agencies to be deleted outright. We expect mass reductions enforced in areas of the federal government that are bloated. We expected massive cuts of our federal contractors and others who are overbilling the federal government.”

And Ramaswamy believes that he and his fellow departmental co-chair, world’s richest man Elon Musk, can expedite those changes by leaning on the highest rungs of the third branch of government: the Supreme Court.

“I think people will be surprised by how quickly we’re able to move with some of those changes, given the legal backdrop the Supreme Court has given us,” Ramaswamy told Fox.

From the Trump administration’s perspective, the executive branch can overstep Congress entirely to swiftly remove agencies such as the Department of Education since they were first enacted by executive action.

“It’s the unelected bureaucrats in the administrative state that was created through executive action,” Ramaswamy said. “It’s going to be fixed through executive action.”

“Think about the Supreme Court’s environment,” he continued. “Over the last several years, they’ve held that many of those regulations are unconstitutional at a large scale. Rescind those regulations, pull those regs back, and then that gives us the industrial logic to then downsize the size of that administrative state.”

After that, DOGE (the agency) would begin examining cuts to the budget. Reminder: Musk promised to trim $2 trillion from the federal budget, which constitutes more than Congress has in discretionary spending, a move that would practically defund the entire executive branch, which doles out funding for the military, national security, and federal agencies.

“And the beauty of all of this is that [it] can be achieved just through executive action without Congress,” Ramaswamy added. “Score some early wins, and then you look at those bigger portions of the federal budget that need to be addressed one by one.”

Donald Trump has his eye on yet another unqualified lightweight to lead a key agency, as the president-elect reportedly is considering loyalist Kash Patel to head the FBI. 

CNN reported Friday that Trump’s right-wing allies are trying to convince him to fire Christopher Wray, whom Trump appointed in 2017 after firing James Comey for allegedly mishandling the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s private email server. 

During his presidential campaign, the president-elect expressed his displeasure at Wray, who drew his ire after Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate was searched in 2022 due to alleged mishandling of classified documents. FBI directors are supposed to serve a single 10-year term, but Patel’s appointment would make him the third FBI director in seven years. 

Patel is a vehement defender of Trump, showing up regularly on Fox News, at conservative events, and even at Trump’s hush-money trial in New York. In the waning days of his first term, Trump pushed to appoint Patel deputy director of the CIA or FBI but backed down only after receiving pushback from CIA Director Gina Haspel and Attorney General Bill Barr. 

“Patel had virtually no experience that would qualify him to serve at the highest level of the world’s preeminent law enforcement agency,” Barr would later write in his memoir. Or, as CNN put it, “Even among Trump loyalists, Patel is widely viewed as a controversial figure and relentless self-promoter whose value largely derives from a shared disdain for the so-called deep state.”

Patel has said he wants to go after government employees who leak information to the press, as well as journalists themselves. On Steve Bannon’s podcast in December, he said that he and other Trump loyalists “will go out and find the conspirators not just in government but in the media. 

“We’re going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections,” Patel said to Bannon. “We’re going to come after you, whether it’s criminally or civilly. We’ll figure that out. But yeah, we’re putting you all on notice.” 

If Trump installs Patel at the FBI, it would certainly further Trump and his MAGA allies’ goal of purging the federal workforce of disloyal employees. It also would raise eyebrows for the next FBI director to have three years working in the Department of Justice as his only law enforcement experience. But Patel has demonstrated loyalty to Trump, which might be enough to win over Republicans in Congress.  

House Republicans are trying to push through a bill that would give President-elect Donald Trump powers as president to designate nonprofit organizations as “terrorist-supporting,” even after it was seemingly defeated earlier this week.

The Stop Terror-Financing and Tax Penalties on American Hostages Act would allow the secretary of the treasury the ability to revoke any nonprofit organization’s tax-exempt status by branding it with a terrorism label. Earlier this week, the bill failed to receive the necessary two-thirds majority in the House to advance to the Senate.  

But on Monday, the House Rules Committee plans to hold a hearing that could set up a new vote on the bill, which initially had the support of all but one Republican and 52 Democrats. With the GOP only holding a seven-seat majority in the chamber, they would need the support of more Democrats to advance the bill, which was introduced to combat protests against Israel’s war on Gaza.  

Under any circumstances, the bill would threaten First Amendment rights to free speech, but after Trump’s election last week, there are now fears that the president-elect could use these new powers to crack down on his enemies with little recourse. In addition to activist groups, many universities and news outlets are nonprofit organizations.

After the bill’s initial failure on Tuesday, the American Civil Liberties Union celebrated the rejection of “new broad and easily abused powers.”  

“The freedom to dissent without fear of government retribution is a vital part of any well-functioning democracy, and now is not the time to grant the executive branch new powers to investigate and functionally shut down and silence its critics,” said Kia Hamadanchy, senior policy counsel for the ACLU, in a statement.

Now the bill could be given a retooling and sent up for a vote again, giving a president who has already threatened to use the military against his critics even more sweeping powers. The question is if Democrats will recognize the bill as granting dangerous powers to the presidency or see it as a chance to clamp down on protesters they have tried to ignore at their peril for the past year.  

MAGA has a new conspiracy theory: Pennsylvania Democrats are trying to steal the Senate election because of how they’re counting provisional ballots.

The Senate race is headed to a recount after an incredibly narrow margin of difference between the top two candidates. Last week, former Republican hedge fund manager Dave McCormick was announced the winner of Pennsylvania’s Senate race with 48.9 percent of the vote, at 99 percent reporting. His opponent, incumbent Democratic Senator Bob Casey, lost with 48.5 percent.

The two sat at a difference of only 29,000 votes Wednesday, and statewide, officials have estimated that nearly 80,000 votes remained outstanding as of Thursday, according to The Philadelphia Inquirer. Casey, who has not yet conceded his seat, has remained hopeful that buried in that remaining 2 percent of the states’ total ballots are enough votes to make up the difference. And Pennsylvania’s Republican secretary of state has already declared the initial results necessitate a recount.

The battle for the remaining votes has ignited long-standing issues between Republicans and Democrats in the state over what ballots are able to be counted. Democrats are pushing to count a number of contested provisional ballots that are missing signatures and privacy envelopes, and election boards across the state are also pushing to count a number of undated ballots.

Bucks County Commissioner Diane Ellis-Marseglia cast a vote Thursday to count certain deficient provisional ballots that were missing one of two required signatures and had previously been barred by court order.

“I think we all know that precedent by a court doesn’t matter anymore in this country,” said Marseglia.

“People violate laws any time they want,” she continued. “So, for me, if I violate this law it’s because I want a court to pay attention. There’s nothing more important than counting votes.”

Technocrat pest Elon Musk shared a video of Marseglia on X, claiming, “They are openly trying to count illegal ballots in Pennsylvania!”

McCormick and his GOP allies went to court on Thursday to challenge the decisions of county commissioners in Philadelphia, Bucks, Montgomery, and Centre counties to include undated mail ballots in their tallies.

Republicans don’t have much hope for ex-Representative Matt Gaetz’s odds of getting into the presidential Cabinet.

The remarkably unpopular Florida politico was nominated by Donald Trump to become the country’s attorney general on Wednesday, a decision that would effectively hand the keys to the Justice Department to a man facing sex trafficking allegations. But before that happens, Gaetz has to be confirmed by the Senate—and that seems increasingly unlikely, according to members of the upper chamber.

Assuming that all Democrats will vote against Trump’s nominees, the president-elect can only afford to lose three Republican votes to squeeze his candidates into the executive branch. But Gaetz faces immense opposition from inside the party, reported The Wall Street Journal, with far more than three votes planning to oppose the MAGA bro’s nomination. Estimates predict that those against Gaetz range from 12 Republican “no” votes to upward of 30.

“It won’t even be close,” one source told the Journal.

Few conservatives were willing to point out the underlying reasons behind Gaetz’s unlikely candidacy, but they appeared to understand the 42-year-old wouldn’t hold up during the grueling confirmation process.

“It’s simply that Matt Gaetz has a very long, steep hill to get across the finish line,” North Dakota Senator Kevin Cramer told the Journal. “And it will require the spending of a lot of capital, and you just have to ask: if you could get him across the finish line, was it worth the cost?”

Another unidentified source familiar with the conversations happening among Republicans over the process told the publication that “people are pissed.”

Trump ally Senator Markwayne Mullin acknowledged that actually getting Gaetz—who up until this week was being investigated by the House Ethics Committee for alleged sexual misconduct with a minor—into the Cabinet would be “very difficult,” suggesting to the Journal that the vigorous vetting process might force Gaetz into a situation where he has to withdraw.

“Every nominee will have to acquit themselves well during the confirmation process by answering difficult questions and having their actions scrutinized,” Senator Lindsey Graham, the top Republican on the Judiciary Committee, told the Journal.

Meanwhile, the soon-to-be upper chamber majority appears unwilling to concede any of its power to the executive branch, pushing back on Trump’s demand that the body expedite the nomination process via recess appointments.

Elon Musk is starting to seriously annoy some in Donald Trump’s inner circle.

Musk has been hanging around Mar-a-Lago ever since his million-dollar gamble to help Trump win the presidential election paid off last week. The billionaire technocrat seems to have no intention of taking a back seat in Trump’s presidency, and it’s starting to piss off those in the president’s ranks, according to two people familiar with the Trump team’s transition who spoke with NBC News earlier this week.

“He’s behaving as if he’s a co-president and making sure everyone knows it,” one of the two people told NBC.

“And he’s sure taking lots of credit for the president’s victory. Bragging about America PAC and X to anyone who will listen. He’s trying to make President Trump feel indebted to him. And the president is indebted to no one,” they added.

The second person said that Musk had been overstepping his bounds, and that Musk has an “opinion on and about everything.”

“He wants to be seen as having say in everything (even if he doesn’t),” the source told NBC.

Musk has been pretty busy since hitching his space-age wagon to the MAGA movement. Musk met with Iran’s U.N. ambassador on Monday, reportedly hoping to broker some kind of peace negotiation on behalf of the United States. Last week, Musk hopped on Trump’s calls with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. “Co-presidents” doesn’t sound too far off.

The second person suggested that Musk was hurting his chances of sticking around by not keeping a low profile, as the former president hates sharing the spotlight. Earlier this week, Trump cracked a joke at Musk’s expense during a meeting with Republican lawmakers, a reminder to everyone that Musk serves at his leisure, not the other way around.

The second person also speculated that Musk might not be as committed to Trump’s agenda as he presents.

This week, Trump tapped Musk to head the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, a nongovernmental body that will push substantial cuts in regulations, spending, and personnel. While Trump has suggested that Musk’s role will be merely advisory, the high-level appointment has signaled that Trump’s White House is open for business to anyone who helps him politically and financially—after all, Musk transformed an essential information environment into a propaganda machine, with the sole purpose of having Trump reelected.

U.S. ambassador to Japan and former Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel is floating the idea of running for chairman of the Democratic National Committee.

Axios reports that Emanuel, who also served in Congress from 2003 to 2009 and worked in the Obama and Clinton administrations, is considering the move after the Democrats’ losses in the 2024 election. The party lost control of the Senate as well as the presidency—and Republicans maintained a narrow majority in the House—leaving open questions about its future direction.

Democratic strategist David Axelrod, a friend of Emanuel’s, said on his podcast Hacks On Tap earlier this week that he would support the ambassador if he ran for the post.

“If they said, ‘Well, what should we do? Who should lead the party?’ I would take Ambassador Rahm Emanuel, and I would bring him back from Japan and I would appoint him chairman of the Democratic National Committee,” Axelrod said.

Since then, other Democrats have told Emanuel he should run, according to Axios. But Emanuel is likely to face opposition from progressives, especially due to his actions as mayor of Chicago. Emanuel’s handling of police violence as well as his record with the city’s public schools earned him a lot of criticism, and the Chicago Teachers Union is still mad at him. ​​

While serving as White House chief of staff under President Obama, Emanuel also clashed with then–DNC chair Howard Dean, who was arguably the most successful party chair in the twenty-first century, with his “50 State Strategy.” Dean said in 2014 that he and Emanuel “obviously have a difference of opinion about how you get people elected.”

This would seem to indicate that Emanuel would be taking a different approach than Dean at a time when Democrats need a plan to take back Congress as well as recover at the state level. Emanuel also has a reputation for angrily going on profanity-laden tirades, which won’t win him friends in a position where one has to be on good terms with Democrats across the country. The fact that Emanuel has been disconnected from local and state politics for years also seems unlikely to help. Democrats are currently expected to tap someone with expertise at the grassroots level and an understanding of how Democrats are winning elections now—two things Emanuel sorely lacks.