The Week Ahead

“Donald Trump has selected his son-in-law Jared Kushner’s father, Charles Kushner, to serve as the next US ambassador to France,” CNN reports. “Kushner was pardoned by Trump in 2020 after serving a prison sentence following a conviction on federal charges.”

“Donald Trump campaigned on a pledge to pardon a vast swath of supporters who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021,” Politico reports. “But his silence on the matter since winning the election has begun unsettling some fervent allies awaiting even the slightest signal from Trump about how he intends to turn his campaign rhetoric into reality.”

“President-elect Trump on Saturday threatened to impose 100% tariffs against emerging markets that try to shift away from the U. S. dollar in international trade,” Axios reports. “The threat against the BRICS nations (primarily Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) is the latest escalation in Trump’s campaign to use the specter of tariffs to achieve policy goals.”

“Donald Trump said Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau committed to working to address the border and fentanyl smuggling, key issues that have led the incoming U. S. president to threaten massive tariffs,” Bloomberg reports. “Trump, in a Truth Social post on Saturday, called their dinner Friday night at his Mar-a-Lago residence in Florida a ‘very productive meeting’ and made no mention of his earlier 25% tariff threat.”

“It had taken the Syrian regime and its backers—Iran, Russia and Hezbollah—more than four years to dislodge rebel forces from the country’s second-largest city of Aleppo. At the time, in 2016, they celebrated that victory as the turning point in Syria’s civil war,” the Wall Street Journal reports. “Now, a surprise rebel offensive has recaptured Aleppo in just a few days, including parts of the city that the Syrian army had never surrendered before.

“Despite Donald Trump’s decisive victory in the presidential election, a political scientist who developed a model that correctly predicted his sweep of battleground states warns that voters have not necessarily given the president-elect a mandate to make radical changes,” The Guardian reports. “In a paper released with little fanfare three weeks before the vote, Cornell University professor of government Peter Enns and his co-authors accurately forecast that Trump would win all seven swing states, based on a model they built that uses state-level presidential approval ratings and indicators of economic health.”