Politics
Opinion: Donald Trump and the mystery of the disappearing checks and balances
If ever a U.S. president needed the checks and balances that the founders established, it’s law-breaking, oath-violating Donald Trump.
Yet those checks by Congress and the Supreme Court will hardly be a check at all once Trump is back in power. The former and future president has shaped each of those institutions in his image.
Opinion Columnist
Jackie Calmes
Jackie Calmes brings a critical eye to the national political scene. She has decades of experience covering the White House and Congress.
He’s already benefited. The Supreme Court, where Trump’s first-term appointees are half of its six-member far-right supermajority, ruled in July that presidents are virtually immune from criminal prosecution for official acts. The court’s dilatory deliberations and then its stunning decision had the effect of delaying past the 2024 election any federal trial for Trump’s alleged first-term crimes: plotting to overthrow Joe Biden’s election and then high-tailing it to Mar-a-Lago with government secrets.
Now that he’s headed back to the White House, those cases will be dropped. It remains to be seen whether Trump, as president, will exploit the license for wrongdoing that the court gave him. If past is prologue, the odds are good. Even better are the chances that the receptive court will rule in Trump’s favor when opponents’ challenges to his future presidential acts inevitably reach it.
But it’s Congress where Trump will have real pull — at least for the two years until the 2026 midterm elections.
Just as at the start of his earlier term, both the Senate and House likely will be under Republicans’ control, if only narrowly, thanks to Trump’s coattails. (The House majority won’t be officially determined until perhaps later this week, but Republicans are favored.) Their tie to Trump is stronger than it was in 2017-18. Republicans then were deferential; come January, they’ll be obsequious. The founders will spin in their graves at the bowing and scraping we’re about to see from the supposedly independent Congress.
Republican Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, House speaker in 2017 and 2018, broke with Trump in 2016 over the “grab ’em by the pussy” tape, but became accommodating enough once Trump was president. But contrast Ryan’s ambivalence with the zealotry of current Speaker Mike Johnson of Louisiana, who’s sure to be chosen as the Republicans’ leader again when they meet this week. Dubbed MAGA Mike by approving right-wingers when he got the speakership last year, Johnson has since made repeated pilgrimages to Mar-a-Lago, campaigned with Trump and at every chance stood like a bespectacled bobblehead beside him.
As Punchbowl News reported: “Now Trump gets a congressional leader who will back his agenda — for better or worse.” Worse, I’ll wager.
In Ryan’s time, a novice President Trump didn’t have much of an agenda or even “concepts of a plan” beyond talk of building a wall, banning Muslims and repealing Obamacare; he didn’t fully realize any of those goals. Credit Ryan and other Republicans for the 2017 tax cuts law that’s counted as first-term Trump’s singular legislative achievement — if you can count a budget-busting giveaway to the richest Americans and corporations as an achievement.
Next year they’ll do it again. The House will extend the Trump tax cuts at a cost of about $1 trillion annually in debt, according to the nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, and add to those breaks, including with the promises Trump made on the campaign trail: “Just plow it through,” as a Republican lobbyist said.
But this time Trump has a sprawling agenda beyond tax cuts: Project 2025, compiled by scores of his most far-right first-term advisors with his public blessing, but so unpopular that he disavowed it during the campaign. No surprise: That disavowal was just one lie among many.
“Now that the election is over, I think we can finally say that, yeah, actually Project 2025 is the agenda. Lol,” conservative podcaster Matt Walsh cynically tweeted last week. To which Trump whisperer Steve Bannon, fresh out of prison for contempt of Congress, responded on his podcast: “Fabulous!”
Look for Trump to issue executive orders and seek legislation from Congress to do much that’s in Project 2025: Blow up the civil service and reestablish a 19th-century-style spoils system. Make the Justice Department his vengeful law firm. End the federal role in education and mount culture wars. Abandon clean energy efforts, though that Trump promise could run up against the reality that Biden’s historic climate investments have brought good jobs, mostly to Republican districts.) Support for Ukraine is all but doomed, just as Trump desires.
In the Senate, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky is stepping aside after a record run as party leader, leaving either Sen. John Thune of South Dakota or Sen. John Cornyn of Texas to become leader of the new majority. Each has had differences with Trump, but neither will likely defy him going forward, especially now that the Senate will include more Trump toadies.
Don’t look for much Senate resistance to Trump’s nominees for his Cabinet, other high posts and federal judgeships, as there was on occasion in his first term.
With Republicans likely to have a slightly larger Senate majority than in 2017-18, relatively moderate Sens. Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska won’t be the decisive naysayers they sometimes were before. Apparently, even anti-vax conspiracist and brain-worm carrier Robert F. Kennedy Jr. isn’t off-limits as a Cabinet possibility: “I think the Senate is going to give great deference to a president that just won a stunning … landslide,” Florida’s Republican Sen. Marco Rubio said when asked about the likes of Kennedy getting a role in the administration.
Here’s a silver lining: Trump, a dictator wannabe with a pliant Congress, will all but certainly overreach. We know that much of his agenda is unpopular. But with Republicans controlling all the levers in Washington, they can nonetheless impose it — and own the result.
The reckoning will come in two years. Midterm elections for almost a century have nearly always gone against the party holding the presidency. May 2026 be no different.
@jackiekcalmes
Politics
Ted Cruz urges White House to halt $1.25B in 'digital equity' funds
FIRST ON FOX: Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, is urging the Biden administration to halt a $1.25 billion “Digital Equity” program, calling it unconstitutional for using race-based criteria to expand broadband access.
“I urge you to withdraw the unlawful [Notice of Funding Opportunity] NOFO and halt issuing Program grants before you cause real harm,” Cruz wrote to Alan Davidson, the assistant secretary of the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) Thursday morning. “NTIA’s use of racial classifications, as set forth in the NOFO, does not serve a compelling governmental interest.”
The letter comes as Republicans push back against diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives as they gear up for the incoming Trump administration. Under the soon-to-be Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), headed by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, such programs like the Digital Equity Competitive Grant Program could be examined as government waste.
“Any source of government waste is in scope for DOGE,” a Ramaswamy spokesperson told Fox News Digital.
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The letter criticizes NTIA’s guidance for the Digital Equity Competitive Grant Program, as Cruz claims it violates the Fifth Amendment’s Due Process Clause, lacking evidence of racial discrimination in internet access and failing to provide clear metrics for its race-based criteria.
The program was a key initiative under the Digital Equity Act, which was authorized by President Biden’s Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act of 2021. It is the third of three digital equity programs established by the act.
Cruz asserts that the program requires grant applicants to prioritize “Covered Populations,” a category that explicitly includes racial and ethnic minorities in the program. He argued the approach includes impermissible racial discrimination, arguing that the federal government cannot use racial classifications without demonstrating a compelling interest and “narrowly tailored” measures.
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“The NOFO provides no evidence racial minorities face discrimination in accessing the internet, let alone specific instances of discrimination that NTIA is seeking to address,” Cruz wrote. “And it does not attempt to make any claim that this discrimination is necessary to avoid a prison race riot.”
Cruz added that “the NOFO does not define ‘minority,’ making it impossible to determine whether it is underinclusive, but in any event, it is overinclusive because it includes anyone who falls into some racial group, without any determination that that specific group has faced discrimination in access to broadband.”
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Cruz, the ranking member of the Senate Commerce, Science & Transportation Committee, urged the NTIA to respond by Dec. 12, either by confirming the withdrawal of the guidance or by providing a detailed explanation of how it complies with constitutional requirements.
Fox News Digital has reached out to the NTIA for comment.
Politics
Opinion: Who's the vice-president elect? Elon Musk or JD Vance?
The speaker of the House, the man second in line to the presidency — Rep. Mike Johnson of Louisiana — had to photobomb the much-shared shot taken aboard the so-called Trump Force One airplane last weekend. There was no room for him at the four-top table where the real power bros — Donald Trump, of course, son Don Jr., world’s wealthiest man Elon Musk, and supposed health nut Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — were grabbing for greasy McDonald’s burgers and fries during their night out to see the UFC fights at Madison Square Garden.
But at least Johnson was in the picture. JD Vance was not.
The man soon to be first in the line of succession was cut out of the clique — as he seemingly has been since the election of the Trump-Vance ticket two weeks ago.
Opinion Columnist
Jackie Calmes
Jackie Calmes brings a critical eye to the national political scene. She has decades of experience covering the White House and Congress.
That’s raised a question around Washington that would be louder but for the cacophony about whether Trump’s Cabinet picks — alleged fellow sexual bad boys Matt Gaetz and Pete Hegseth; fellow admirer of murderous tyrants Tulsi Gabbard, and Kennedy, the conspiracy-minded anti-vaxxer who’s usually not a fan of fast food — will win Senate confirmation to head the Justice, Defense, intelligence and health departments, respectively.
Where’s the vice president-elect?
“Y’all seen JD Vance?” former Republican Party Chair Michael Steele wondered on MSNBC over the weekend.
The future veep was finally spotted on Wednesday, not beside Trump but back on Capitol Hill, ducking in and out of offices. Vance, a senator from Ohio for less than two years, was squiring Gaetz around to his Republican colleagues’ offices in hopes of persuading them to support confirmation of the manifestly unqualified Cabinet pick. As if Vance, rather than a vengeful Trump, has that kind of pull with the senators.
Meanwhile, Musk has been so ubiquitous at the president-elect’s side that Trump advisors are reportedly getting sick of him. The satirists at the Onion headlined an item, “Trump Locks Bathroom Door So Elon Musk Can’t Follow Him In.”
For the megabillionaire (and mega Trump donor), whose fortune owes much to his federal auto and aerospace contracts over the years, the joined-at-the-hip comradery with Trump — at Mar-a-Lago, day-tripping in Washington, courtside in Madison Square Garden and then in Texas for a SpaceX rocket launch on Tuesday — is already good for business.
“He’d be worthless” but for government subsidies, Trump sniped in 2022, before the two formed their mutually beneficial bond only months ago. Since the election, Musk’s net worth has increased nearly 25% based on future growth assumptions, Bloomberg estimated. And the federal largesse he enjoys isn’t likely to be threatened by the spending cuts that Trump has promised: Welfare of the corporate kind is rarely on Republicans’ chopping block, but certainly not now, given that Trump has put Musk in charge of a Department of Government Efficiency to identify targets to slash.
In past administrations, that’s the kind of role that presidents would delegate to their vice presidents, much as Bill Clinton assigned Al Gore to “reinvent government” and George W. Bush allowed Dick Cheney to essentially call the shots in his “war on terror.”
More than two weeks into Trump’s transition back to power, we know what he wants Musk to do, as well as Gaetz, Hegseth, Kennedy, Gabbard and more. Vance, not so much.
Aside from shepherding Trump’s nominees, Vance has been missing in action not just in Mar-a-Lago but in the Senate, too. That provoked intraparty grousing this week, even from Trump, when Vance’s absence in the closely divided body helped Senate Democrats, who still run the joint until January, to push through the confirmations of some of President Biden’s final nominees to federal judgeships. Vance posted on X that one of his right-wing critics was a “mouth breathing imbecile” and then deleted the post.
“No more Judges confirmed before Inauguration Day,” the boss warned Republican senators. (That’s rich coming from the man who, after his 2020 defeat, had Senate Republicans ram through a number of judges — including U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon in Florida, Trump’s judicial helpmeet who delayed and then stunningly dismissed the case against him for making off with classified documents in 2021.) As in his first term, Trump will get to fill whatever vacancies Biden leaves behind.
Vance’s deleted post did provide one clue to his activities lately: He’s been interviewing candidates to be the director of the FBI. That suggests both that Trump will indeed fire Christopher Wray, his first-term pick who subsequently enraged him by, among other things, approving the successful search of Mar-a-Lago for classified material in 2022, and that Vance may be carving a niche for himself as Trump’s retribution deputy.
When Trump tapped 40-year-old Vance for veep, the Ohioan was described by many Republicans as the future of a MAGA-fied party and country. Yet he embodies a future at odds with the nation’s challenges and trends.
Vance will play his T.B.D. part in an administration that seems hellbent on exacerbating climate change with a full-on embrace of fossil fuels. That would hasten the nation’s fiscal insolvency by further cutting taxes for the rich. That would threaten that economy (and the United States’ moral standing) by mass-deporting migrants when an aging population needs their labor. And that would purportedly make America great again by returning to a system in which white men continue to dominate, despite the country’s ever-growing diversity and women’s advancement.
Whatever Vance’s role, at least by his virtual invisibility he’s not running the risk that Musk is: Stealing the spotlight from the narcissist in chief. That never ends well.
@jackiekcalmes
Politics
Democrat Tammy Baldwin details recipe for running in a swing state after victory in Trump-won Wisconsin
Sen. Tammy Baldwin, D-Wis., successfully won re-election in Wisconsin all while President-elect Donald Trump simultaneously flipped the state back to red in the presidential election.
As to how she did it, the Democrat attributes much of her win to her “72-county strategy.” Baldwin made sure during her campaign to traverse the entire state, venturing far from the two large blue enclaves of Milwaukee and Dane counties.
“I think showing up matters, listening matters,” she said in an interview with Fox News Digital. “And so I go, and I really listen and get to know the challenges and aspirations of people all over the state, rural areas, suburban areas, urban areas.”
Baldwin won by a few tens of thousands of votes in the state, clinching victory by roughly the same margin as Trump.
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According to her campaign, she did more than 250 events in Wisconsin in 2024 alone. She also hosted several targeted tours during her campaign, including her Dairyland Tour and her Rural Leaders for Tammy Tour.
Further, Baldwin’s campaign microtargeted rural communities to deliver content regarding her agricultural work.
But her rigorous travel is not the only thing that sealed the deal for her. The senator acknowledged that people can go everywhere, but they also need to effectively engage voters in each place they travel to.
One thing she noted is that she’s “had years to earn the trust of Wisconsin voters,” referencing the short few months that the campaign of Vice President Kamala Harris had to turn out voters for her in the state.
Baldwin also said she convenes roundtables and forums on relevant issues while she travels in Wisconsin.
“So I’ve done that on, say, the fentanyl and opioid epidemic, bringing together first responders, public health officials, concerned community members to talk about what does the epidemic look like in this community, in this area of the state? What resources do you need? What are your biggest worries?”
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She also held events geared toward agricultural issues, she noted.
Baldwin notably credits, in part, her work on agricultural issues with her re-election win. In early October, Baldwin earned the endorsement of the Wisconsin Farm Bureau Federation Board of Directors, which was a significant achievement for a Democrat in a statewide election.
“They cited a number of different measures that I either championed or actually got into law,” she said.
The senator pointed to her Dairy Business Innovation Act, which provides small grants to various dairy producers and processors.
“I went this past spring to a particular farm that had received one of these grants, and they had also invited several other farmers and processors who had received grants to show me what they were able to do with these grants in order to grow their business and improve their bottom line,” she said.
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The Wisconsin Democrat also pointed to the large manufacturing sector in her state and attributed her push for “buy America” rules in pieces of legislation as helping her win some of those voters.
On whether her campaign is a model for other Democrats, specifically those in swing states, she said, “I think it is something that would be helpful to many public officials.”
Baldwin added that she realized the need to travel Wisconsin to this extent during her first Senate campaign: “I had been in the House of Representatives representing, as you know, seven counties in [the] south-central part of the state. I had to learn Wisconsin as I was running.”
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“And so traveling to do that learning was extremely important, being exposed to, you know, the timber industry and the north woods. We didn’t have a big timber industry in the south-central part of the state.”
The Midwestern senator also said this was the first time she heard from Wisconsinites that elected officials hadn’t been spending much time in certain parts of the state.
“One thing I will say that I hear from constituents when I show up is just like, ‘I don’t remember the last time we had a U.S. senator visit our community, and especially not a Democrat,’” she said.
“It’s like, you know, the timber industry folks saying, ‘I don’t think we’ve ever had a senator pay so much attention to us,’” she added.
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