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Incoming commander-in-chief lashes out at long-standing Democratic foe over natural disaster engulfing Hollywood as his expansionist ambitions met with mockery
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Donald Trump has called on California Governor Gavin Newsom to resign over the wildfires currently rampaging through Los Angeles, which have already killed five people, destroyed more than 1,000 structures and forced 150,000 residents to evacuate.
The president-elect accused Newsom, city mayor Karen Bass and Joe Biden of “gross incompetence” and declared the City of Angeles “a total wipeout” on his Truth Social platform.
“One of the best and most beautiful parts of the United States of America is burning down to the ground,” Trump fumed in another post.
“It’s ashes, and Gavin Newscum should resign. This is all his fault!!!”
Newsom, however, has hit back, angrily attacking Trump for attempting to “politize” the tragedy as his office accused the president-elect of engaging in “pure fiction” in his social media posts speculating on the environmental catastrophe.
Meanwhile, the incoming commander-in-chief’s dreams of using military force to annex Greenland and rename the Gulf of Mexico have been met with ridicule at home and abroad, with Denmark, France, Germany and Britain declining to take him seriously.
Trump is in Washington DC today for the state funeral of former president Jimmy Carter, attending a Cathedral service with his fellow surviving presidents.
The Biden administration will continue protecting about 2,000 grizzly bears in four Rocky Mountain states despite objections from Republicans.
Federal officials have said they will reclassify the grizzly’s status so that ranchers would be able to shoot bears that are killing livestock.
Officials will end protections for the animals in states where they are no longer found, including California, Colorado, New Mexico and Oregon.
The animals have been protected as a threatened species across the lower 48 states since 1975.
Officials during President-elect Trump’s first term sought to eliminate those protections but were blocked in court.
Here’s more from Matthew Brown.
Officials during Donald Trump’s first term sought to eliminate protections for the bears
This week, the president-elect refused to rule out using economic or military force to seize the Panama Canal and (or) wrestle Greenland away from Denmark.
He’s taught Europe an important lesson, says Sam Kiley.
This week, the president-elect refused to rule out using economic or military force to seize the Panama Canal and (or) wrestle Greenland away from Denmark, writes world affairs editor Sam Kiley. He’s taught Europe an important lesson
The search giant is the latest company to donate $1m to the president-elect’s inaugural fund, following in the footsteps of other major corporations such as Amazon, Meta, Uber and OpenAI.
Ariana Baio has the story.
Trump’s inaugural fund has received more than $170 million in donations
Donald Trump must keep backing Ukraine with weapons and ammunition to ensure the country is not “erased off the map”, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has said during a final meeting of Kyiv’s allies before the president-elect returns to the White House.
Speaking at the 25th and final meeting of the Ukraine Contact Defence Group at the Ramstein air base in Germany, where more than 50 of Kyiv’s allies discussed how best to combat Vladimir Putin’s invasion, Zelensky said it would be “crazy” for Trump to alter the US’s support for his country.
“We’ve come such a long way that it would honestly be crazy to drop the ball now and not keep building on the defense coalitions we’ve created,” he said.
“No matter what’s going on in the world, everyone wants to feel sure that their country will not just be erased of the map.”
Tom Watling reports.
‘We’ve come such a long way that it would honestly be crazy to drop the ball now,’ says Ukrainian leader
Speaking on Capitol Hill last night after meeting with congressional Republicans, the president-elect had this to say about the Los Angeles wildfires, adopting a noticeably more sympathetic tone than he has chosen on social media.
The only problem with that is that Beverly Hills is not actually on fire and is, instead, serving as a voluntary evacuation zone, with venues like the exclusive Beverly Hills Hotel throwing open their doors to local people temporarily displaced by the tragedy, as The Los Angeles Times has reported.
Speaking to CNN’s Anderson Cooper, California Governor Gavin Newsom became visibly emotional when asked about the president-elect’s attempts to blame him for the unfolding environmental disaster.
“People are literally fleeing. People have lost their lives. Kids lost their schools, families completely torn asunder, churches burned down,” Newsom said, implying that Trump’s criticism was extremely ill-timed as well as unfair.
Railing at the Republican for attempting to politicize the disaster, he stopped himself short by saying: “I have a lot of thoughts and I know what I want to say… I won’t.”
By contrast, he praised Joe Biden by saying: “I stood next to a President of the United States of America today, and I was proud to be with Joe Biden.
“And he had the backs of every single person in this community.
“He didn’t play politics, didn’t try to divide any of us.”
Newsom’s press office has also rebuked Trump’s theorizing on social media about the fires, stating flatly: “There is no such document as the water restoration declaration – that is pure fiction.
“The governor is focused on protecting people, not playing politics, and making sure firefighters have all the resources they need.”
Meanwhile, back in the courts, the Manhattan prosecutor has filed his objections to the president-elect attempting to use the US Supreme Court to stop his hush money sentencing tomorrow, making similar arguments to the state appeals court we’ve just reported on.
In summary, Alvin Bragg says Trump’s claim “that any invocation of presidential immunity automatically entitles him to a stay pending appeal is incorrect.”
None of Trump’s claims “comes close to justifying a stay of the forthcoming sentencing,” he says.
The president-elect “makes the unprecedented claim that the temporary presidential immunity he will possess in the future fully immunizes him now, weeks before he even takes the oath of office, from all state-court criminal process,” Bragg writes, striking an incredulous tone.
“This extraordinary immunity claim is unsupported by any decision from any court. It is axiomatic that there is only one President at a time. Non-employees of the government do not exercise any official function that would be impaired by the conclusion of a criminal case against a private citizen for private conduct. And as this Court has repeatedly recognized, presidential immunity is strictly limited to the time of the President’s term in office.”
He adds that Trump’s claim that evidence used against him should have been shielded by immunity “does not support an interlocutory appeal or an automatic stay pending appeal because it is not an argument that defendant is immune from suit on the underlying criminal charges, which here are concededly based on defendant’s unofficial conduct having no connection to any presidential function”.
Bragg concludes: “There is a compelling public interest in proceeding to sentencing; the trial court has taken extraordinary steps to minimize any burdens on defendant, including by announcing his intent to sentence defendant to an unconditional discharge; and defendant has provided no record support for his claim that his duties as president-elect foreclose him from virtually attending a sentencing that will likely take no more than an hour.”
Here’s a historic moment as the president-elect greets his old deputy in public for the first time since placing his life in mortal danger on January 6 2021.
Donald and Melania Trump have arrived to their seats as they join other world leaders in paying their respects to the late former president, with the Trumps seating in front of Prince Edward, the Duke of Edinburgh, and the outgoing Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and next to a certain Barack Obama.
Steve Calabresi and Edward Meese III have leapt to the president-elect’s defence and find themselves in direct opposition to the Manhattan prosecutor as they insist that “presidential immunity requires that the prosecution brought against him in New York County by District Attorney Alvin Bragg be dismissed and the jury verdict vacated.”
Meanwhile, the conservative think-tank the Heritage Foundation has put out a rather hysterical statement against Trump’s sentencing, warning that he is already engaged in official acts as president-elect and “besmirching his standing as he performs those duties would be noxious to the Constitution”.
It reads as follows:
“Even if the Constitution did not definitively require dismissal, prudence counsels it. While a state has a legitimate interests in each criminal prosecution to vindicate its sovereign right to define societal harms and pursue violators, the United States has a compelling public interest in the sitting president’s devoting his full attention to his duties, unburdened and undistracted by ongoing prosecutions.
“President Trump is already engaged in official duties as President-Elect and besmirching his standing as he performs those duties would be noxious to the Constitution. No President can be impaired in that fashion by a county prosecutor. Even if the charges were well-founded and the continued prosecution consistent with the Constitution, New York’s interests in any single criminal prosecution is dwarfed by the interests of the Nation as a whole.”
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