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Donald Trump will talk to Fox News’ Sean Hannity tonight for his first sit-down interview since his inauguration. A clip of their conversation includes a moment when Trump muses that it’s “sad” that former President Joe Biden did not pardon himself.
In other news, the Department of Defense is set to send about 1,500 active duty troops to the U.S.-Mexico border as the crackdown on immigration begins.
The armed forces will join the 2,500 National Guard and Reserve forces already stationed at the border. Currently, there are no active duty troops working at the border.
The forces are expected to back up border patrol agents with logisitics, transportation, and barrier construction.
They have done similar things in the past when both Trump during his first term and former President Joe Biden sent active duty troops to the border with Mexico.
This comes the president orders all government staff working on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives be put on administrative leave immediately.
The White House has stated that all DEI staffers would be put on leave by 5pm ET on Wednesday.
Trump called for the end to the “dangerous, demeaning and immoral” intitiatives in an executive order issued on Tuesday.
The president repeatedly attacked DEI programs on the campaign trail, claiming that they were discriminatory.
DEI programs aim to push participation in workplaces by people from all backgrounds.
Trump picks right-wing activist Brent Bozell to run agency that controls Voice of America
Donald Trump has selected Brent Bozell to run the United States Agency for Global Media.
The agency is a US-supported global media agency. Voice of America falls under the USAGM’s umbrealla.
Trump has tapped former news anchor and failed senatorial and gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake to head Voice of America.
Former Tesla executive sues Elon Musk’s company over remote work bait-and-switch that upended his life
A former Tesla executive says he agreed to take a job working remotely for the electric carmaker, which then almost immediately went back on its word and threatened to fire him if he didn’t relocate from his home in Southern California — allegedly prompting the recurrence of an agonizing medical condition and threatening his marriage.
In a lawsuit filed last month in state court and moved to federal court on Wednesday, compliance and operational risk specialist Mike Tully accuses Tesla of a heartless bait-and-switch after “being promised and assured” he wouldn’t be required to move. The Irvine resident only accepted the position because of this guarantee, which came via his new boss, Associate General Counsel Charles Lee, according to the previously unreported complaint.
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Trump tears into his ‘stupid’ former aide Bolton, says he ‘blew up the Middle East’
Donald Trump unleashed a tirade against former aide John Bolton on Wednesday as he increasingly signals that he will back away from Washington’s center-right foreign policy establishment.
The president was asked about his day-one decision to strip a federal protective detail from Bolton, who served as his national security adviser early on in his first term in the White House.
Bolton, long one of the most outspoken supporters of direct military action to combat Iran and its proxies in the Middle East, was allegedly targeted for assassination by the Iranian regime in 2022 in retaliation for the Trump administration’s killing of Qassem Soleimani, a top commander in the Iranian Revolutionary Guard (IRGC).
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Trump names agent with him during PA assassination attempt as new head of the Secret Service
Donald Trump has named his special agent-in-charge to lead the US Secret Service.
Sean Curran — who helped protect Trump during his attempted assassination in Butler, Pennsylvania last sumer — will now head the agency, according to a statement he made on TruthSocial.
ICE switches back to using ‘aliens’ rather than ‘immigrants’
ICE officials are directing employees to use the term “alien” instead of “immigrant,” a new memo distributed across the enforcement agency details.
Immigrant rights groups consider the term derogatory and dehumanizing because of the way they’ve been used by conservative pundits and politicians.
The term will be used in all “internal and external communications,” Axios reported. The Independent has asked ICE for comment.
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Trump administration freezes many health agency reports and posts
The Trump administration has put a freeze on many federal health agency communications with the public through at least the end of the month.
In a memo obtained by The Associated Press, acting Secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Dorothy Fink told agency staff leaders Tuesday that an “immediate pause” had been ordered on — among other things — regulations, guidance, announcements, press releases, social media posts and website posts until such communications had been approved by a political appointee.
The pause also applies to anything intended to be published in the Federal Register, where the executive branch communicates rules and regulations, and the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention scientific publication.
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Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes meets with lawmakers after leaving prison on Trump clemency
Stewart Rhodes never entered the Capitol building on January 6, 2021, after he conspired with members of his far-right anti-government Oath Keepers militia group to break into halls of Congress in what prosecutors described as an act of terrorism.
But two days after Donald Trump released him from prison, Rhodes freely walked through congressional office buildings in the Capitol complex.
Rhodes — whose 18-year sentence for seditious conspiracy was commuted by the president as one of his first official actions in the Oval Office — met with at least one member of Congress on Wednesday.
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Trump tells Sean Hannity it’s ‘sad’ that Biden didn’t pardon himself
President Donald Trump told Fox News’s Sean Hannity it’s “sad” that former president Joe Biden didn’t pardon himself at the end of his administration.
Trump made the remark to Hannity as he was asked about his predecessor’s decision to pardon members of his own family and others he said he would be targeted by Republicans, in Trump’s first interview from the White House Wednesday. The interview was being aired in full Wednesday at 9 p.m. Eastern time.
Biden issued several pardons in the final hours of his presidency Monday after Trump declared he would seek “retribution” against his perceived enemies by using his powers as president while on the campaign trail.
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Trump ‘cruelly’ leaves thousands of refugees stranded after he cancels flights to the US
Refugee resettlement groups were blindsided by Donald Trump’s sudden suspension of refugee admissions into the United States, which immediately canceled travel plans for thousands of people who were cleared for entry.
A memo from the State Department to resettlement groups and partner agencies announced that “all previously scheduled travel of refugees to the United States is being canceled, and no new travel bookings will be made” — including travel for refugees who were slated to arrive in the country before Trump’s executive order took effect on January 27.
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Trump’s immigration juggernaut leaves Democrats scrambling for a coherent message of their own
President Donald Trump got his first major legislative win on Wednesday when the House passed the Laken Riley Act. The legislation requires that immigration authorities detain anyone who is arrested with theft, burglarly, larceny or other related crimes.
Republicans moving immediately on immigration makes sense. Trump won largely because voters believed that immigration at the U.S.-Mexico border was out of control during the Biden administration. Kamala Harris famously laughed off a question early in the Biden presidency about why she had not been to the border. The president was even displaying a chart about the influx of migrants when he was shot and wounded in Butler, Pennsylvania in July.
On top of that, Trumpworld knows it only has a limited amount of time before voters potentially turn on the president for his actions on immigration if they come off too cruel. As a result, he’s signed a slew of executive actions on immigration.
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Source: independent.co.uk
