What we're watching: Thune and Johnson gameplan with Trump
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Here’s what we’re watching in transition world today:
????️ What we're watching
- President-elect Donald Trump met with Speaker Mike Johnson and incoming Senate Majority Leader John Thune in his suite at the Army-Navy game on Saturday to discuss how to implement his agenda, Playbook reports this morning. Johnson and Thune are anxious to get the internal debate over next steps settled, and both know only Trump can do the settling.
- Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell is taking aim at his party’s isolationist wing in a new op-ed in Foreign Affairs, a rare rebuke of Trump.
- Trump renewed his push to end daylight saving time, calling it “inconvenient, and very costly to our Nation.”
???? What’s Trump up to?
- He’s making an announcement at 11 a.m. at Mar-a-Lago.
????What’s up with the nominees?
- Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) said Sunday that Pete Hegseth, the president-elect’s secretary of Defense pick, told him that he would release the person who accused him of sexual misconduct from her nondisclosure agreement.
- On Saturday, Trump chose Devin Nunes to run the President’s Intelligence Advisory Board, an independent group within the Executive Office that oversees the U.S. intelligence community’s compliance with the Constitution. Nunes was a former Republican representative from California and chair of the House Intelligence Committee. He is the current CEO of Trump’s social media platform Truth Social.
- Trump’s national security adviser pick, Rep. Michael Waltz (R-Fla.), said that the U.S. needs to take a stronger stance on consequences for foreign hackers following recent hacks targeting Trump and Vice President-elect JD Vance by a Chinese-backed group. “We need to start going on offense and start imposing, I think, higher costs and consequences to private actors and nation state actors that continue to steal our data, that continue to spy on us,” he told CBS News on Sunday.
????ICYMI: Here are the latest Trump administration picks
- Trump tapped businessman Bill White to serve as U.S. ambassador to Belgium on Saturday. White stepped down as CEO of the New York Intrepid Sea-Air-Space Museum in 2010 due to an investigation into a state pension scandal launched by then-Attorney General of New York Andrew Cuomo. He was a major donor to Trump’s 2024 campaign.