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Tracking Trump’s picks for his Cabinet and administration
Unpaywalled – Here are the people Trump has named to his incoming administration or the top contenders for unfilled roles based on our reporting. We will continue to update this article.
The New York Times – Tracking Trump’s Cabinet and Staff Nominations [unpaywalled] – President-elect Donald J. Trump has quickly begun to assemble the list of people he wants to serve in his cabinet and in other senior positions during his second term. The cabinet always comprises at least 16 positions — the vice president and the heads of the 15 executive departments — and presidents have discretion to elevate other officials, like the White House chief of staff, to the cabinet level. This page will be updated as new announcements are made.
See also – Trump picks Brendan Carr as FCC chairman. Carr vowed to take on “censorship” by Big Tech companies in Project 2025, which laid out a conservative agenda for Donald Trump’s second term. Also – President-elect Donald J. Trump is eyeing a new candidate for Treasury Secretary amid internal debate over who should have the role: the former Federal Reserve governor Kevin Walsh.
See also The NewYorker – Donald Trump’s Cabinet of Wonders. The President-elect’s nominations look like the most flagrant act of vindictive trolling since the rise of the Internet. But it is a trolling beyond mischief. …In Gaetz, who faces allegations (which he denies) of illegal drug use and having sex with an underage girl, Trump sees himself, a man wrongly judged, he insists, as liable for sexual abuse. In Kennedy, an anti-vax conspiracy theorist, he sees a vindication of his own suspicion of science and his wildly erratic handling of the Covid crisis.
In Hegseth, who defends war criminals and lambastes “woke” generals, he sees vengeance against the military establishmentarians who called him unfit. In Gabbard, who finds the good in foreign dictators, he sees someone who might shape the work of the intelligence agencies to help justify ending U.S. support for Ukraine. In other words, Trump’s nominations—in their reckless endorsement of the dangerously unqualified—look like the most flagrant act of vindictive trolling since the rise of the Internet. But it is a trolling beyond mischief.
All these appointees are meant to bolster Trump’s effort to lay waste to the officials and the institutions that he has come to despise or regard as threats to his power or person. These appointees are not intended to be his advisers. They are his shock troops.
The Death of Search Atlantic unpaywalled – AI is transforming how billions navigate the web. A lot will be lost in the process. “…Although ChatGPT and Perplexity and Google AI Overviews cite their sources with (small) footnotes or bars to click on, not clicking on those links is the entire point.
OpenAI, in its announcement of its new search feature, wrote that “getting useful answers on the web can take a lot of effort. It often requires multiple searches and digging through links to find quality sources and the right information for you. Now, chat can get you to a better answer.” Google’s pitch is that its AI “will do the Googling for you.”
Perplexity’s chief business officer told me this summer that “people don’t come to Perplexity to consume journalism,” and that the AI tool will provide less traffic than traditional search. For curious users, Perplexity suggests follow-up questions so that, instead of opening a footnote, you keep reading in Perplexity.
The change will be the equivalent of going from navigating a library with the Dewey decimal system, and thus encountering related books on adjacent shelves, to requesting books for pickup through a digital catalog. It could completely reorient our relationship to knowledge, prioritizing rapid, detailed, abridged answers over a deep understanding and the consideration of varied sources and viewpoints.
Much of what’s beautiful about searching the internet is jumping into ridiculous Reddit debates and developing unforeseen obsessions on the way to mastering a topic you’d first heard of six hours ago, via a different search; falling into clutter and treasure, all the time, without ever intending to. AI search may close off these avenues to not only discovery but its impetus, curiosity…”
The request comes to Judge Tanya Chutkan in a six-page motion. Mr. Smith acknowledges that it “has long been the position of the Department of Justice that the United States Constitution forbids the federal indictment and subsequent criminal prosecution of a sitting President.” Trump takes office January 20.
Mr. Smith writes that America has “never faced the circumstance here, where a federal indictment against a private citizen has been returned by a grand jury and a criminal prosecution is already underway when the defendant is elected President.” The special counsel consulted the DOJ’s Office of Legal Counsel, which determined that “this prosecution must be dismissed before the defendant is inaugurated.”
The special counsel explains that the prohibition on prosecuting a sitting president is “categorical” and “does not turn on the gravity of the crimes charged, the strength of the Government’s proof, or the merits of the prosecution, which the Government stands fully behind.” Mr. Smith reckons that if Trump had not won, the government could have taken the case to a jury — and won a conviction.
He’s the President-elect, not the President, correct? So he could still be fair game but as Sunny noted on Twitter, “Jack Smith continues his undisputed heavyweight championship title of failing to secure final, non-overturned convictions of top politicians. Bob McDonnell. John Edwards. Now Donald Trump.”
And in just over four years, Trump won’t be President at all