Trump's 2020 Campaign Complicates The Present

This article is part of The D. C. Brief, TIME’s politics newsletter. Sign up here to get stories like this sent to your inbox. Inside Donald Trump’s hermetically sealed bubble of supporters, it’s become something of a given that the former and future President can simply bypass Congress and magically fill his Cabinet with the loyalists of his choosing.

President-elect Donald Trump’s decision to pick Matt Gaetz as Attorney General has cast a spotlight on the embattled Florida lawmaker’s legal and ethical troubles. Gaetz, a fierce defender of Trump and critic of the Justice Department, now finds himself poised to lead the very agency that investigated him for allegedly sex trafficking a minor—an investigation that ended without charges but will loom large over his political future.

Evangelical quack Ryan Walters got a taste of reality from CNN's Pamela Brown, who exposed his ludicrous plans to put a Trump Bible in every classroom while Oklahoma is ranked 48th out of 50 in education in the country. Brown had to constantly correct his lies about the Founding Fathers and his attacks against the ACLU and Southern Poverty Law. During the entire interview, Walters claimed those who brought the lawsuits against his extreme religious agenda to public schools demand radical gender pornography be taught in schools.

One of the greatest ballet stars in the world dies by losing his balance. Not suspicious at all. Source: The Guardian The acclaimed Russian ballet dancer Vladimir Shklyarov has died aged 39. Shklyarov died after falling from the fifth floor of a building on Saturday, a spokesperson for the Mariinsky Theatre told the news outlet Fontanka at the weekend. The spokesperson, Anna Kasatkina, told Russian media that Shklyarov had been taking painkillers for a back injury and had been scheduled to undergo spinal surgery on Monday. While a federal investigation has been launched to investigate the dancer’s death, “the preliminary cause” has been ruled an accident, the Russian news agency RIA Novosti reported. "A stupid, unbearable accident" that just happens to occur with great frequency in Mother Russia, especially among those who criticize Putin's war in Ukraine. Shklyarov condemned Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in a now-deleted Instagram post from March 2022, declaring his opposition to “all kinds of military actions.” “It is impossible to watch everything that is happening today without tears,” Shklyarov wrote. In contrast to Olga Smirnova, a star ballerina of the Bolshoi Ballet who fled Russia and moved to Europe, Shklyarov continued performing in Russia and refrained from further commenting on the war.read more

WASHINGTON — President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee for defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, has reignited a debate that many thought had been long settled: Should women be allowed to serve their country by fighting on the front lines? The former Fox News commentator has made it clear, in his own book and in interviews, that he believes men and women should not serve together in combat units.

He’s seriously ill now, and I’m one of the many wishing him a swift, pain-free, and complete recovery, especially because he made me a happier person.