Trump Promises to Rename Gulf of Mexico on Day One as President

Donald Trump will rename the Gulf of Mexico and Mount Denali by executive order in one of his first acts as president. 

The news broke shortly before he was sworn in Monday morning, and Trump confirmed it during his inaugural address. The order will rename the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America, and Mount Denali to Mount McKinley, which was the official name recognized by the federal government from 1917 until 2015. 

Trump first announced his plans to rename the gulf nearly two weeks ago in a rambling press conference, saying, “We’re gonna be changing the name of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America…. What a beautiful name. And it’s appropriate…. Mexico has to stop allowing millions of people to pour into our country. They can stop them.”

Not long after that declaration, Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum held a news conference of her own where she asked, “Why don’t we call it Mexican America? It sounds pretty, no?”

Denali is the tallest mountain in North America, and gained its name from the Koyukon Athabaskans, the original inhabitants of Alaska. A gold prospector gave it the name McKinley in 1896 as a show of support for William McKinley, who was running for president at the time, and the federal government made the name official in 1917. In 1975, the state of Alaska sought to have the name changed, only to be blocked by Ohio politicians supporting their native son McKinley. 

In 2015, President Obama officially renamed the mountain to what Alaska natives had called it for centuries. Last month, though, Trump told supporters in a speech in Arizona that he would  “bring back the name of Mount McKinley because I think he deserves it.”

Trump could also be making the move because he wants to stick it to Obama, or because he admires McKinley’s imperialism. In any case, changing both names will be costly to U.S. taxpayers, and serve no strategic purpose whatsoever. It’s the first of likely many more pointless moves in the new Trump administration.

Trump wants to carry out another “manifest destiny” —but this time on Mars..

“We will pursue our manifest destiny into the stars, launching American astronauts to plant the stars and stripes on the planet Mars,” the newly inaugurated president said on Monday to the audience gathered in the Capitol Rotunda, who reacted to his comments with a standing ovation. “Ambition is the lifeblood of a great nation. And right now our nation is more ambitious than any other. There’s no nation like our nation.”

“Manifest destiny” was the violent, presumptuous 19th century idea that white American settlers had some religious obligation to seize Native land in the West, to convert Native Americans to Christianity, and to exploit the region’s ample resources.

Trump’s Mars pledge elicited a huge grin and enthusiastic double thumbs up from billionaire and top Mars colonization enthusiast Elon Musk, who has been pushing his Mars colony agenda for nearly a decade via his SpaceX company.

Donald Trump used his inauguration speech to whine about tech billionaires’ homes being burnt down. 

During his address Monday, Trump whined about the federal government’s response to natural disasters. 

“Our country can no longer deliver basic services in times of emergency,” he groused. 

Trump cited people in North Carolina still struggling from the aftermath of Hurricane Helene. In Los Angeles, “we are watching fires still tragically burn from weeks ago without even a token of defense,” Trump said. 

“They’re raging through the houses and communities, even affecting some of the wealthiest and most powerful individuals in our country. Some of whom are sitting here right now,” Trump said, smiling slightly at the reminder of his Silicon Valley invites, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, and Sundar Pichai. 

“They don’t have a home any longer,” Trump mused. “That’s interesting.”

In fact, not a single one of these men appear to have lost their home in the Los Angeles wildfires. 

Crucially, these aren’t the kinds of guys who can lose a lot by losing just one residence: each one owns an extensive property portfolio worth hundreds of million dollars. Bezos’s is worth $500 million, and Zuckerberg’s is $200 million. Meanwhile, Musk owns several properties, though his primary home is a $50,000 tiny home in Texas, near SpaceX’s headquarters. So maybe the president could save his tears for the people who have lost their actual homes.  

Rather than actually acknowledging the devastating and widespread impacts of natural disasters, Trump’s comment merely suggests his special affinity for tech billionaires. After all, it’s Trump and his fellow Republicans who are ensuring those affected by the wildfires stay struggling by insisting that no disaster aid will be provided to California until the state agrees to reinstall Trump-era policies. 

With just minutes left as president, Joe Biden on Monday pardoned his entire immediate family—and gave clemency to prominent Native American activist Leonard Peltier.

Biden pardoned his younger brother James Biden, his sister-in-law Sarah Biden, his younger sister Valerie Biden Owens, his brother-in-law John Owens, and his younger brother Francis Biden “FOR ANY NONVIOLENT OFFENSES against the United States which they may have committed or taken part in during the period from January I, 2014, through the date of this pardon.”

Biden also commuted the sentence of Peltier. While he did not receive a pardon, he will be serving the rest of his life sentence in home confinement. Peltier is an indigenous activist affiliated with the American Indian Movement, which sought to address police brutality against Native people. He was sentenced in 1975 for the murder of two FBI agents during a shooting on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota. Peltier is now 80 years old, in ailing health, and has maintained his innocence throughout his nearly 50 years behind bars. Even one of the former federal prosecutors who put Peltier behind bars, James Reynolds, thinks that he’s innocent.

“We were not able to prove that Mr. Peltier personally committed any offense on the reservation. As a result to Mr. Peltier’s conviction, now arrest, is that he was guilty of a murder simply because he was present on the reservation that day,” Reynolds wrote in a letter to Biden. “He has served time for more than 46 years on the hands of minimal evidence, a result I strongly doubt would be upheld in any court today.”

This story has been updated.

Melania Trump’s meme cryptocurrency launched Sunday night, skyrocketing in value and netting her a tidy profit only hours before she returns to the White House as first lady.

In an X post, Trump posted a photo of herself with the caption “The Official Melania Meme is live! You can buy $MELANIA now.” The price of the coin went to $12 in a matter of hours, with a market cap of more than $12 billion.

At the same time, Donald Trump’s meme coin, $TRUMP, launched on Friday, plummeted more than 40 percent. His coin had a very auspicious start, becoming the second-largest meme coin based on market cap. But right after his wife’s coin launch, the president-elect’s coin lost more than $7.5 billion in value.

The windfall for both Trumps, coming right before the inauguration, is a sign that profiteering from the president and first lady will occur unabated by ethical concerns or worries about the Constitution’s emoluments clause. The new president has said he plans to make the United States the “crypto capital of the planet,” and his cryptocurrency ventures are taking in millions from shady sources.

Many of Trump’s appointees are a nod to the crypto industry, including David Sacks as A.I. and crypto czar and Paul Atkins as head of the Securities and Exchange Commission. Crypto investors spent millions of dollars getting Trump elected—and billions of dollars will flow into the cryptocurrency for the next four years.

Any cryptocurrency regulations will likely be ones that appease crypto investors and ensure that the money continues flooding into the pockets of the president, first lady, and their friends and supporters. The grift is now official policy.

Yet another Republican lawmaker resigned Monday to join Donald Trump’s incoming administration, drawing into sharp relief the state of uncertainty and discord which has overtaken the House GOP.

Representative Michael Waltz left his seat to serve as Trump’s national security adviser—making the House Republicans’ slim majority over the Democrats even tighter at 218-215. 

This presents a major problem for House Speaker Mike Johnson, who struggled to unite his party last month around passing a bill to keep the government open. The party’s next moves to execute Trump’s agenda on the debt ceiling, border, energy, and tax policy are still up in the air, according to Politico—and the margin of error for getting everyone on the same page is shrinking by the day. 

Even Johnson’s most accelerated timeline predicts that a bill on these policies won’t land on Trump’s desk until March. Republicans have been waiting with bated breath for a set of marching orders from Trump, and they’re reportedly growing impatient. 

“Everybody is feeling the pressure now of time,” Representative Ralph Norman told Politico. “In a short period, we’ve got to make something happen.”

House Appropriations Chair Tom Cole was another fretting Republican who had been waiting on the party’s top-line discretionary spending targets. “We’re running out of time,” Cole told Politico. 

And on the horizon, there is another looming problem for Republicans: a March 14 government funding deadline, which is set to be another contentious bout as Republicans will have to foster bipartisan support. 

Waltz, who resigned Monday,  previously declared his intention to oust all non-political appointees and career intelligence officials from Trump’s National Security Council, saying that “everybody is going to resign at 12:01 on January 20.”

Trump is eager and ready to destroy something etched into the Constitution: birthright citizenship. 

The concept is held in the 14th Amendment: Anyone born in the United States of America is a U.S. citizen, regardless of where their parents are from. Trump has floated eliminating this simple privilege for some time, telling Meet the Press last month that “we have to end” the bedrock policy. But now, he has a plan to make it a reality via executive order targeting children of undocumented immigrants.

“The federal government will not recognize automatic birthright citizenship for children of illegal aliens born in the United States,” a Trump official said Monday. “We are also going to enhance vetting and screening of illegal aliens.”

There were few details on the scope of the expected order, which is expected to kick off a legal battle in the courts.

Pam Bondi, Trump’s nominee for attorney general, seems ready to support the president-elect tirelessly in this endeavor. When asked directly at her congressional hearing last week if she thought birthright citizenship was “the law of the land” (it very much is), Bondi refused to answer. “I will study birthright citizenship,” she said.  

Whether Trump can actually end birthright citizenship is unknown. He’d need either the Supreme Court to defend his order, or a two-thirds majority in the House and Senate to repeal the Amendment (along with ratification by three-quarters of the states). But this wouldn’t be the first time the courts have reinterpreted the law in his favor.

Vivek Ramaswamy’s time as the potential co-chair of the not-yet-real Department of Government Efficiency appears to be coming to an end.

The biotech executive has reportedly been clashing with the “rank and file” of the cost-cutting department, CBS reported Sunday, just hours before Donald Trump’s inauguration. Reporter Jennifer Jacobs noted that Ramswamy is being encouraged to exit the agency.

“Vivek has worn out his welcome,” one person close to Trump told CBS.

People around the other co-chair of the department, world’s-richest-man and major Trump donor Elon Musk, have expressed frustration with Ramaswamy’s lack of involvement in the massive undertaking. Despite the fact that both appointees spent considerable time at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort during the transition, the pair have reportedly not worked together for a while. Ramaswamy had no comment for the network.

Last week, Trump personally implored Ramaswamy to consider taking Ohio’s Senate seat, recently vacated by Vice President-elect JD Vance, if it was offered to him by Governor Mike DeWine. Ramaswamy had publicly backed out of the race to replace Vance in November after Trump announced him as a potential DOGE co-chair. Ramaswamy seemingly changed his mind over the last week, however, meeting with DeWine to discuss the appointment.

But Ramaswamy didn’t get the job—instead, the gig went to Ohio Lieutenant Governor Jon Husted. Moments before DeWine’s announcement, an anonymous source close to Ramaswamy told Reuters that the biotech executive is planning to launch a run to replace a term-limited DeWine as Ohio’s governor in 2026, a move that would further solidify his exit out of Trump’s inner circle. Ramaswamy is expected to formally announce the bid by the end of the month, according to Fox News.

Still, Ramaswamy isn’t totally on the outs. The multimillionaire was spotted Monday morning arriving at the Capitol ahead of Trump’s inauguration.

At almost the last minute, President Biden issued surprising preemptive pardons for some of Donald Trump’s enemies. 

On Monday morning, Biden issued pardons to Anthony Fauci, the infectious diseases expert who took on the Covid-19 pandemic, as well as Mark Milley, the former chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He also pardoned the members and staff of the House January 6 committee, which was led by Democrat Bennie Thompson and Republican Liz Cheney, as well as Washington Metro Police and U.S. Capitol Police officers who testified before the committee. 

The pardon recipients have all been attacked by Trump and his supporters, and many on the right have called for them to be criminally charged. Milley has reportedly told former colleagues that he fears being court-martialled by Trump out of revenge for his actions during Trump’s first term, where he checked some of the then-president’s worst impulses. 

Fauci’s time advising the White House during the Covid-19 pandemic led to frequent clashes with Trump over how to manage public health, with the two parting ways on acrimonious terms. The January 6 pardons stem from various threats they’ve received from Trump and his supporters, as well as from Trump’s appointees, such as Kash Patel, who have vowed to take revenge on the president-elect’s behalf.  

Biden shocked many of his supporters last month when he pardoned his son Hunter from all present and future crimes out of fear that the coming Trump administration would single him out. Monday’s pardons seem to be protecting some of the right’s favorite bogeymen from Trump’s vengeance, which could come soon after he is sworn in later in the day.

Donald Trump’s promise to save TikTok has divided him from a throng of Senate Republicans, sparking disunity in the party just hours before the MAGA leader is scheduled to retake the Oval Office.

Several key Republicans, including House Speaker Mike Johnson and Senators Tom Cotton and Pete Ricketts, have pushed back against Trump’s efforts to keep the popular video-sharing app in the U.S. market.

“I think we will enforce the law,” Johnson told NBC News on Sunday.

In a joint statement, Cotton and Ricketts reiterated their support for the bipartisan legislation banning the platform, praising American companies for suspending their relationships with TikTok and its Chinese-owned parent company ByteDance.

“We commend Amazon, Apple, Google, and Microsoft for following the law and halting operations with ByteDance and TikTok, and we encourage other companies to do the same. The law, after all, risks ruinous bankruptcy for any company who violates it,” Cotton and Ricketts wrote.

“Now that the law has taken effect, there’s no legal basis for any kind of ‘extension’ of its effective date,” they continued. “For TikTok to come back online in the future, ByteDance must agree to a sale that satisfies the law’s qualified-divestiture requirements by severing all ties between TikTok and Communist China.”

TikTok preemptively went dark on Saturday, causing its 170 million American users to lose access to the platform and their accounts before the ban was legally mandated. The platform explicitly blamed Joe Biden for its shutdown, even though Biden had said he would not enforce the law before leaving office.

Trump then claimed he was examining a 90-day pause on TikTok’s ban, stipulating that the company’s divestment from ByteDance would also have to result with the U.S. gaining an ownership stake in the app. Such a pause is technically permitted within the bounds of the law, which allows for such a break so long as a sale of the company is in progress. Failing those specifications would technically see Trump in a position of flouting the two other branches of government, both of whom have supported upholding the national security-oriented restriction.

When TikTok spontaneously resumed operations on Sunday, it returned with a message for users that the company was working with “President Trump on a long-term solution that keeps TikTok in the United States.”

“We thank President Trump for providing the necessary clarity and assurance to our service providers that they will face no penalties providing TikTok to over 170 million Americans and allowing over 7 million small businesses to thrive,” the multibillion dollar company wrote in a statement on its platform. “It’s a strong stand for the First Amendment and against arbitrary censorship.”

On Sunday, far-right political pundit and Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk caught flak for backing the president-elect’s decision, with Truth Social users torching the duo for fighting to keep “Chinese spyware alive.”