Key Battlegrounds Tighten

“Senior officials on President-elect Donald Trump’s transition team on Friday weighed the future of Pete Hegseth, Trump’s choice to lead the Defense Department, amid new revelations that police investigated an allegation that he sexually assaulted a woman in 2017,” the Washington Post reports. “The internal turmoil over Hegseth’s future was sparked by a complaint shared with the transition team with extensive information about a woman’s claim that Hegseth assaulted her in a hotel in Monterey, California, after a Republican conference… The woman who drafted the complaint said the alleged victim was a friend who later signed a nondisclosure agreement with Hegseth.” CNN: Trump’s transition team caught off guard by Hegseth allegation.

“Locked out of power next year, Democrats are hatching plans to oppose President-elect Donald J. Trump that look nothing like the liberal ‘resistance’ of 2017,” the New York Times reports. “Gone are the pink knit caps and homemade signs from the huge protest that convulsed blue America that year, as exhausted liberals seem more inclined to tune out Mr.

New York Times: “Emboldened, confident in his instincts and more contemptuous than ever of Washington expertise, Mr. Trump is staffing the most important roles in his government at breakneck speed. Advisers have been stunned at how fast he is ticking through his choices, filling the government’s most important positions roughly a month sooner than he did in 2016.” “Much of the action has taken place under the chandelier in the tearoom at Mar-a-Lago, where Mr.

“In naming a set of unconventional nominees to run federal departments, Donald Trump this week also took steps to push for a broader goal: realigning the balance of power among Washington’s major institutions so that more authority flows from the White House,” the Wall Street Journal reports. “Trump has threatened to take steps that would undermine the Senate’s confirmation powers and Congress’s role in budgeting—the most essential powers of the two chambers.

New York Times: “Over nearly three decades as a tech entrepreneur, he has honed his penny-pinching by digging into minutiae and cutting as deeply as possible — often preferring to cut too much rather than too little.” “Perhaps most importantly, Mr. Musk has been brutally unsentimental about the cuts, paying little regard to norms and conventions.

Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH), who was unseated last week by Republican businessman Bernie Moreno, seems open to a bid to replace Sen. JD Vance (R-OH), who will be leaving the upper chamber to serve as vice president, The Hill reports.