Jack Smith drops Trump election case: live updates

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau reportedly called Donald Trump on Monday evening, after the incoming American leader threatened to impose steep tariffs on Canada to stop migration and drug smuggling at U.S. borders.

The pair had a “constructive call,” where Trudeau emphasized that such issues are “miniscule” on the U.S.-Canada border compared with the U.S.-Mexico one, according to Bloomberg.

More detail on Trump’s tariff threat in our full story.

President-elect Donald Trump has endorsed Florida’s Chief Financial Officer Jimmy Patronis to replace Matt Gaetz in the US House of Representatives.

Patronis, a long-time ally to the president-elect, has served as Florida’s CFO since 2017. He is married with two children and owns a seafood restaurant in Panama City.

In January, the CFO promoted a state bill that would have helped Trump, whose Mar-a-Lago residence is in Florida, pay his mounting legal fees.

Robby Starbuck, a former music video director who campaigns against corporate diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, said on Monday that he had persuaded the US retail giant to end a raft of “woke policies” such as providing racial equity training to its workers and funding anti-racist non-profits.

The company will review all funding for LGBT+ Pride events, remove all “transgender products” marketed to children from its stores, and stop participating in the Human Rights Council’s LGBT+ equality index.

It will also stop using the terms “DEI” and “LatinX” in official communications and stop requiring its suppliers to provide “certain demographic data” as part of its supplier diversity program.

Io Dodds has the story.

The Trump administration might kick traditional journalists out of the White House press room and replace them with online media personalities, according to Donald Trump, Jr.

“We had the conversation about opening up the press room to a lot of these independent journalists,” Trump said on his Rumble show “Triggered.”

”Why not open it up to people who have larger viewerships, stronger followings?” he added.

Trump, who said he recently talked about the idea with his father, president-elect Donald Trump, claimed such a step was necessary because outlets like The New York Times “lied” and had been “adverse to everything.”

After federal prosecutors signaled their plans to abandon the criminal cases against Trump, the president-elect celebrated his legal victory by insulting prosecutors, judges and district attorneys.

On Truth Social, Trump called the cases “empty and lawless” declaring they should have never been brought against him because they wasted “$100 Million Dollars of Taxpayer Dollars.”

As he has done in the past, Trump claimed the cases were politically motivated and brought by Democrats.

He insulted Fulton County DA Fani Willis and special prosecutor Nathan Wade, two people who oversaw the Georgia federal election interference case and faced accusations of misconduct. Claiming Wade has “zero experience”, Trump accused the two of taking vacations together using the money Wade was paid with.

He lashed out at Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg, claiming Bragg did not want to bring the New York hush-money case against Trump but did so at the behest of the Justice Department. The New York case was separate from federal criminal inquiries.

Trump also accused New York AG Letitia James of unethically and “probably illegally” campaigning on a platform of holding Trump accountable.

 “It was a political hijacking, and a low point in the History of our Country that such a thing could have happened, and yet, I persevered, against all odds, and WON,” Trump said.

A majority of Americans are satisfied with Donald Trump’s election victory and approve of the transition process into his new administration, according to a CBS/YouGov poll released on Monday.

According to the poll, 59 percent of respondents approve of the transition process and 55 percent are happy or satisfied with Trump’s victory.

That support, however, is highly fractured on partisan lines, with 95 percent of Republicans optimistic or excited about Trump compared with just 15 percent of Democrats.

Elon Musk has appeared to confirm that his social media company X, formerly Twitter, throttles traffic to other websites by stifling any posts that contain outside links.

Paul Graham, an influential tech investor and essayist, had complained on Sunday about X’s “deprioritization of tweets with links in them,” saying it made it harder to “find out what’s going on.”

“Just write a description in the main post and put the link in the reply. This just stops lazy linking,” Musk replied.

Graham then questioned why it should be any less “lazy” for him to link to one of his essays in a reply rather than an initial post, but Musk had not responded further as of Monday evening.

Io Dodds reports.

Elon Musk is already identifying specific government employees with “fake jobs” as he recommends mass firings as co-chair of Donald Trump’s newly-created Department of Government Efficiency.

The billionaire re-shared a post last week that highlighted Ashley Thomas, a little-known director of climate diversification at the US International Development Finance Corporation. The original poster shared a screenshot of Thomas’s role, writing, “I don’t think the US Taxpayer should pay for the employment of a ‘Director of Climate Diversification (she/her)’ at the US International Development Finance Corporation.”

Musk captioned his re-shared post: “So many fake jobs.

President-elect Donald Trump on Monday threatened to unilaterally impose a massive consumption tax on Americans who purchase goods imported goods from three of the country’s top trading partners on the day he takes office, seemingly with no regard for the inflationary effects of such a move.

In a series of posts on his Truth Social platform, Trump said he would hike the cost of Mexican and Canadian products by 25 percent by executive order if both countries did not take steps to curb what he described as unacceptable flows of drugs and migrants into the U.S. across their respective borders.

“On January 20th, as one of my many first Executive Orders, I will sign all necessary documents to charge Mexico and Canada a 25% Tariff on ALL products coming into the United States, and its ridiculous Open Borders,” he wrote.

More details in our full story.