There are again allegations of sexual misconduct in Trump’s future cabinet. Matt Gaetz withdraws his candidacy. All developments in the news blog.
11.45 a.m.: Trump’s designated Education Secretary Linda McMahon is suspected of having covered up the sexual abuse of minors for years. McMahon and her husband, who ran the World Wrestling Federation for decades, are accused of sticking with announcer Melvin Phillips Jr. despite repeated allegations of sexual abuse.
Phillips Jr., who died in 2012, is accused of systematically abusing underage ring assistants in the late 1980s and 1990s. It wasn’t until one of the victims went public in 1992 that Phillips Jr. was fired. The indictment released at the end of October accuses the McMahons of “criminal negligence” because they knew about the allegations but did nothing about it.
Linda McMahon, who has had a long-standing friendship with Donald Trump, headed the Small Business Administration, a US agency that looks after the needs of small and medium-sized companies, from 2017 to 2019. She then moved to the organization responsible for financing Trump’s 2020 campaign. She was one of Trump’s closest advisors during his election campaign this year.
4:44 a.m.: US President-elect Donald Trump is considering appointing Kevin Warsh as Treasury Secretary, according to a media report. The Wall Street Journal reported this on Thursday (local time), citing people familiar with the matter. Trump is said to have promised Warsh that he could later be nominated to head the US Federal Reserve (Fed) when Jerome Powell’s term of office ends in 2026.
Kevin Warsh is a financier and banking executive who served as a board member of the Federal Reserve from 2006 to 2011. According to insiders, Donald Trump met with Warsh and Apollo Global Management CEO Marc Rowan on Wednesday. Both are considered candidates for the office of finance minister.
12:30 a.m.: Donald Trump has nominated former Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi as the future Attorney General following the surprising withdrawal of his candidate Matt Gaetz. She served as a prosecutor for 20 years. “She did an incredible job,” Trump praised the lawyer. “That’s why I asked her in my first term to lead the Commission on Opioids and Drug Abuse,” Trump wrote on his network Truth Social. The 59-year-old Republican was also part of the legal team that represented Trump in his first impeachment trial from December 2019 to February 2020.
Trump’s designated attorney general withdraws candidacy
6:37 p.m.: Just over a week after his nomination, Matt Gaetz, the controversial candidate for US Attorney General, announced his resignation from the post. “We don’t have time for an unnecessary long argument in Washington,” Gaetz said on Thursday on X. That’s why he’s withdrawing and is no longer available for this office. There was “strong momentum”, but then it turned out that his nomination was “unfairly” distracting from the important work of taking over the government from the future US President Donald Trump.
Trump nominated the ultra-right hardliner Gaetz for the important post of Justice Minister on November 13th. In the days that followed, massive criticism of this decision quickly arose, as Gaetz himself was in conflict with the law and the rules of Congress. In an initial reaction to the 42-year-old’s withdrawal, Trump said he still had “a bright future” ahead of him. The right-wing populist Donald Trump, who won the presidential election on November 5th, has already announced almost all of the nominations for his future cabinet. Some of them are highly controversial. The filling of the ministerial posts must be approved by the US Senate, in which Trump’s Republicans regained the majority in the election.
