Trump meets with NATO secretary common; hedge fund supervisor Scott Bessent tapped to guide treasury: Live

“I’m glad that if it was going to happen, it happened on the King holiday, because Dr King is still speaking to us,” she told The Independent. She sees the January 20 event as a wake-up call for the country and an opportunity to stand up to the incoming administration’s charged agenda items.

Michelle Del Rey reports.

Gustaf Kilander reports.

Jon Sopel writes:

We’ve all been there. That infatuation moment. That time at the outset of a relationship when you can’t think about anyone else, don’t want to be with anyone else. Every minute without them is a minute wasted; where you find yourself engaging in their hobbies because if they love them, so must you, too.

And broadly speaking, that is where we are in that most unlikely of bromances: that of Elon and Don.

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The congressman from Florida resigned abruptly from the House days after winning another term, and stated that he wouldn’t serve in the upcoming Congress set to take shape in January. His departure — and his nomination to the post of attorney general — were a shock to Republicans and Democrats alike on Capitol Hill.

The drip-drip quickly began, as John Bowden reports.

Mexico has been taking a bashing lately for allegedly serving as a conduit for Chinese parts and products into North America, and officials here are afraid a re-elected Donald Trump or politically struggling Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau could try to leave their country out of the U.S.-Mexico-Canada free trade agreement.

Mexico’s ruling Morena party is so afraid of losing the trade deal that President Claudia Sheinbaum said Friday the government has gone on a campaign to get companies to replace Chinese parts with locally made ones.

“We have a plan with the aim of substituting these imports that come from China, and producing the majority of them in Mexico, either with Mexican companies or primarily North American companies,” Sheinbaum said.

Katie Hawkinson has the story.

On Friday, NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte met with President-elect Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Florida.

According to a statement, they discussed the range of global security issues facing the Alliance.

The Secretary-General and his team also met with Congressman Mike Waltz and members of the President-elect’s national security team.

On the campaign trail over the summer, Donald Trump claimed that North Korean leader Kim Jong Un “misses me,” and that relations between their two countries would improve with a second Trump term.

At a defense expo in Pyongyang this week, the North Korean dictator had a very different message, as Josh Marcus reports.

A source told The Bulwark that the president-elect called Gaetz just hours before his withdrawal, warning him that he didn’t have enough support in the Senate.

“You don’t have the votes,” Trump told Gaetz, according to the source. “These senators aren’t moving.”

According to a second source, the former Florida lawmaker is said to have acknowledged that he was four to six Republican votes shy from the threshold needed.

He could only afford to lose two GOP votes to maintain the majority in the 100-seat upper chamber – with Republicans holding a 53 to 47 seat majority.

Pam Bondi, the woman Trump has tapped to be his next attorney general, found herself caught up in a canine custody battle where she was accused of stealing a pet dog.

Bondi, 59, adopted a St. Bernard after it was separated from its family by Hurricane Katrina in 2005 from Florida’s Pinellas County Humane Society. She changed its name from Master Tank to Noah.

When the animal’s true owners, Louisiana couple Steve and Dorreen Couture, tracked Master Tank down to Bondi’s home in Tampa Bay in January 2006 and found him in the lawyer’s custody, their request for his return was refused.

Instead, Bondi accused the grandparents of neglecting the animal.

“I took a dog who was a walking skeleton,” she told The St Petersburg Times at the time.

“If I thought I was sending him to a stable environment, where he would be cared for, as hard as it would be, I’d put him in my car and drive him back myself.

The Coutures denied her accusation, revealing that Master Tank had suffered from heartworms since he was 10 months old and continued to demand his return.

The family sued and a 16-month legal battle ensued, which ended with the two sides settling before the dispute came to trial.

Bondi eventually returned Master Tank to the Coutures with a supply of food and medication.