Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) kept his gavel amid a threat from the right flank of the House GOP, but managing the House GOP is not going to get any easier from here. The dramatic Friday Speaker vote on the House floor – in which three Republicans nearly kept Johnson from the gavel before two of them reversed course to support him – showcased the challenges ahead as Johnson aims to usher President-elect Trump's ambitious legislative agenda through a razor-thin House majority. Around a dozen Republicans had withheld support for Johnson ahead of the vote, demanding that Johnson make commitments on spending reductions and a more open process for crafting major legislation. |
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BY MIKE LILLIS AND MYCHAEL SCHNELL |
Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) on Friday defied his most conservative critics to retain his gavel in the next Congress, overcoming threats from a group of far-right lawmakers leery of his leadership record and commitment to spending cuts. The victory puts Johnson in the driver's seat of the lower chamber just as President-elect Trump is poised to return to the White House for a second term, lending Republicans control of all levers of power in Washington for at least the next two years. |
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Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) was reelected to the top post in the House in a stunning floor vote on the opening day of Congress on Friday, securing the gavel on the first ballot. But the vote did not come without drama. Reps. Ralph Norman (R-S.C.) and Keith Self (R-Texas) had initially voted for candidates other than Johnson — Norman voted for Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) and Self voted for Rep. Byron Donalds (R-Fla.). |
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BY ZACH SCHONFELD AND ELLA LEE |
A New York judge has ordered President-elect Trump's criminal sentencing for Jan. 10, rejecting his demand that his hush money case be dismissed to accommodate his presidency following his election victory. Judge Juan Merchan signaled he is inclined to impose no punishment for Trump's 34-count felony conviction, given concerns about his immunity from criminal prosecution upon taking the oath of office. |
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President-elect Trump took to Truth Social to share his frustration after a judge set a Jan. 10 sentencing date in his New York hush money case, calling out a gag order which prevents him from discussing court staffers and prosecutors. "This illegitimate political attack is nothing but a Rigged Charade. 'Acting' Justice Merchan, who is a radical partisan, just issued another order that is knowingly unlawful, goes against our Constitution and, if allowed to stand, would be the end of the Presidency as we know it," the incoming president wrote in a Friday Truth Social post. |
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Former Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) clapped back a President-elect Trump after he blasted President Biden for awarding her and Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.) the Presidential Citizens Medal this week. "Donald, this is not the Soviet Union," Cheney wrote Friday on social platform X. "You can't change the truth and you cannot silence us." |
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The deadly New Orleans attack on New Year's Day, which authorities say was carried out by a man radicalized by ISIS, is spurring fears of more attacks and raising questions about how President-elect Trump's isolationist tendencies will affect the war on terrorism.
Shamsud-Din Jabbar, 42, a retired U.S. Army veteran from Texas who worked at accounting firm Deloitte, killed 14 people after plowing a truck through the crowded Bourbon Street, marking the first ISIS-inspired attack on U.S. soil since 2017. Jabbar was shot and killed by police.
ISIS has been severely degraded by a U.S.-led campaign in Iraq and Syria, but the terrorist group has rebounded in recent years and claimed responsibility for several deadly attacks across the world in 2024. |
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Investigators said the deceased suspect in the Las Vegas Cybertruck explosion was suffering from PTSD and left behind notes in his phone detailing his motive for the attack during a Friday news conference. Matthew Livelsberger's body was recovered from inside the destroyed vehicle alongside camp fuel canisters and firework mortars. The authorities said Livelsberger was a highly decorated Army soldier who was on approved leave at the time of the explosion. |
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President-elect Trump tapped Morgan Ortagus, a former State Department spokesperson, to serve as deputy special presidential envoy for Middle East peace in his next administration. Trump noted in his announcement that Ortagus previously was critical of him. As a Fox News contributor in 2016, she bashed Trump over behavior she thought was "disgusting." She then served in the State Department from 2019 to 2021. |
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BY ANDREW YEO AND ARAM HUR | OPINION | South Korean President v's martial law declaration on Dec. 3 shocked the world. How could a vibrant, advanced democracy like South Korea revert so suddenly?
To stop the decree, 190 of the 300 members of parliament battled their way past gun-bearing soldiers to enter the National Assembly and vote to repeal martial law as thousands of citizens joined in protest. Yoon reversed his decree within six hours, but he defiantly resisted calls for his resignation and impeachment. Although Yoon survived the first impeachment attempt, pressure mounted for his removal. On Dec. 14, the National Assembly voted 204 to 85 to impeach the president. |
OPINION | Doubting the new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has become the latest fad among Beltway insiders. Skeptics on the left unsurprisingly want DOGE to fail for ideological reasons. More unexpected are conservative and libertarian cynics who, while wishing Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy all the luck in the world, are dubious of success.
To these skeptics, no outsiders could understand Washington's tangled web of statutes, regulations and administrative practices well enough to deliver meaningful deregulation within 18 months — let alone trim $2 trillion from the federal budget. |
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Four years ago, after the tumultuous first Trump administration, President Biden came into office promising to rebuild old alliances and defend democracy. The man tasked with doing that on the world stage was Secretary of State Antony Blinken, a longtime diplomat who had worked with Biden for two decades. The message to America's allies and enemies alike was that a new era of stability was at hand. Instead, Blinken was beset by an escalating series of international crises almost from the beginning. The self-imposed wounds of the disastrous Afghanistan withdrawal were quickly followed by the generational challenge of Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Hamas's savage attack on Israel and Israel's subsequent scorched-earth war in Gaza plunged the region into crisis and destabilized the political climate in America. |
President-elect Trump's exact plans to raise tariffs remain a mystery, even to Phil Ruffin, a close friend and business partner to Trump. Increased tariffs could boost business for Harper Trucks, a small hand-truck manufacturer Ruffin has owned for more than four decades, or end up raising costs of parts the factory imports from China. (A hand truck, sometimes called a dolly or a hand trolley, is a small, wheeled cart used to move heavy objects.) Tariff policy could be critical for American manufacturers like Harper, fighting to survive. Harper's sales volumes have fallen in recent years, which Ruffin blames on cheap hand-truck imports, largely from Vietnam. Tariffs stand to make Harper's made-in-America products more attractive by making foreign goods more expensive through a tax paid by importers. |
BY ABBY SEWELL AND MELANIE LIDMAN |
A fragile ceasefire between Israel and the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah has held up for over a month, even as its terms seem unlikely to be met by the agreed-upon deadline. The deal struck on Nov. 27 to halt the war required Hezbollah to immediately lay down its arms in southern Lebanon and gave Israel 60 days to withdraw its forces there and hand over control to the Lebanese army and U.N. peacekeepers. So far, Israel has withdrawn from just two of the dozens of towns it holds in southern Lebanon. And it has continued striking what it says are bases belonging to Hezbollah, which it accuses of attempting to launch rockets and move weapons before they can be confiscated and destroyed. |
In the first three days of 2025, Elon Musk commandeered global politics through dozens of rapid-fire, often inflammatory posts to his 210 million followers on X.
The world's richest man called for the release of a jailed British far-right extremist. He shared a post pressing King Charles III to dissolve Parliament and order a new general election, as he posted memes and a flurry of attacks directed at Prime Minister Keir Starmer. Musk accused Starmer of failing to prosecute so-called "rape gangs" more than a decade ago, a child exploitation scandal that has prompted Britain's Conservative Party to call for a full national inquiry. |
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