The Republican attorneys general of Virginia and Montana recently filed an amicus brief asking the Supreme Court to require TikTok to sever its ties with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) as the fate of the social media platform in the U.S. remains uncertain.

The amicus brief, filed Friday, came the same day President-elect Trump filed an amicus brief of his own, asking the Supreme Court to pause the TikTok ban and allow him to make executive decisions about TikTok once he is inaugurated.

In an announcement, Virginia Attorney General Jason Miyares said he, along with Montana Attorney General Austin Knudsen and other state legal officials, had recently petitioned the Supreme Court to uphold the divest-or-ban law against TikTok.

The social media company has been intensely scrutinized over its parent company, ByteDance, which is connected to the CCP. In his brief, Miyares argued whistleblower reports prove ByteDance has shared sensitive information with the CCP, including Americans’ browsing habits and facial recognition data.

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“Allowing TikTok to operate in the United States without severing its ties to the Chinese Communist Party exposes Americans to the undeniable risks of having their data accessed and exploited by the Chinese Communist Party,” Miyares said in a statement. “Virginians deserve a government that stands firm in protecting their privacy and security.

“The Supreme Court now has the chance to affirm Congress’s authority to protect Americans from foreign threats while ensuring that the First Amendment doesn’t become a tool to defend foreign adversaries’ exploitative practices.”

GET TO KNOW DONALD TRUMP’S CABINET: WHO HAS THE PRESIDENT-ELECT PICKED SO FAR?

President-elect Trump smiles during Turning Point USA’s AmericaFest at the Phoenix Convention Center Dec. 22 in Phoenix.  (Rebecca Noble/Getty Images)

Trump’s brief said it was “supporting neither party” and argued the future president has the right to make decisions about TikTok’s fate. Steven Cheung, Trump’s spokesman and the incoming White House communications director, told Fox News Digital Trump’s decision-making would “preserve American national security.”

“[The brief asked] the court to extend the deadline that would cause TikTok’s imminent shutdown and allow President Trump the opportunity to resolve the issue in a way that saves TikTok and preserves American national security once he resumes office as president of the United States on Jan. 20, 2025,” Cheung said.

Trump’s brief notes he “has a unique interest in the First Amendment issues raised in this case” and that the case “presents an unprecedented, novel, and difficult tension between free-speech rights on one side, and foreign policy and national-security concerns on the other.”

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TikTok Inc. offices in Culver City, Calif. (AP Photo/Damian Dovarganes)

“As the incoming Chief Executive, President Trump has a particularly powerful interest in and responsibility for those national-security and foreign-policy questions, and he is the right constitutional actor to resolve the dispute through political means,” Trump’s brief said.

Fox News Digital’s Brooke Singman contributed to this report. 

When he came to power in 2015, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was hailed as a progressive icon, a charismatic leftist with movie star good looks who promised to reform elections, tackle climate change and legalize marijuana. He quickly became one of the world’s best-known political figures, known for agenda-setting liberal policies — and for taking selfies with enraptured fans.

“He was seen as this Canadian rock star,” said Duane Bratt, a political scientist at Mount Royal University in Calgary.

Nine years later, Trudeau is deeply unpopular at home and fighting for his job amid growing calls that he step down.

Voters blame Trudeau for Canada’s sluggish economy, housing crisis and near-record levels of immigration. For months now, polls have shown that it is highly unlikely that he could lead his Liberal Party to victory in the next election, which is due by Oct. 20 of next year.

The election of Donald Trump last month has made things worse for Trudeau.

Conservatives and even members of his own Liberal Party insist he isn’t doing enough to counter Trump, who has threatened to levy heavy tariffs on imports from Canada, and who has trolled Trudeau in recent weeks by repeatedly describing him as “governor” of a 51st American state.

This week, one of Trudeau’s staunchest allies, Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland, abruptly resigned over her disagreement with Trudeau’s approach to Trump.

In a sharply worded letter announcing her departure, Freeland accused Trudeau of embracing “costly political gimmicks” instead of directly confronting the U.S. leader and of putting his own interests ahead of the best interests of Canadians.

Freeland’s resignation, part of a recent exodus of Cabinet members, has thrown Trudeau’s government into disarray and prompted fresh demands from members of his caucus and other allied parties that he step down.

At the same time, Canada’s three opposition parties are demanding that Trudeau call new elections.

“Everything is spiraling out of control,” Pierre Poilievre, leader of the Conservative Party, said Monday. “We simply cannot go on like this.”

The crisis facing Trudeau highlights the geopolitical havoc that Trump has wrought since his election, still weeks before his official return to the White House.

And it speaks to the same anti-incumbent headwinds and economic anxieties that helped doom the Democrats in recent U.S. elections.

“Everything that seemed bright and refreshing about Trudeau in 2015 now looks old and tired,” Bratt said.

Trudeau is the eldest son of the late Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, who led Canada for 15 years beginning in 1968.

The younger Trudeau worked as a teacher before he entered politics. He was just 43 when he toppled the Conservative government of Stephen Harper by mobilizing legions of young voters energized by his promise to bring back social liberalism.

As prime minister, Trudeau legalized marijuana and enacted a national carbon tax that officials say will reduce the country’s emissions by a third by the end of this decade. He also became a prominent liberal counterweight to Trump, who was first elected in 2016.

Former U.S. President Donald Trump and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau talk before a NATO meeting in England in 2019.

(Frank Augstein / Associated Press)

After Trump banned travel to the U.S. from several Muslim-majority countries in 2017, Trudeau announced that Canada’s doors were open.

“To those fleeing persecution, terror and war, Canadians will welcome you, regardless of your faith,” he wrote on the social media platform now known as X. “Diversity is our strength.”

Trudeau was largely praised for steering the country through a successful renegotiation of the U.S.-Mexico-Canada free trade agreement, a process that Freeland helmed.

But COVID-19 posed a challenge for Trudeau, with the country’s economic recovery more sluggish than that of the United States.

Recently, Trudeau has come under fire for allowing near-record numbers of migrants into Canada during and after the pandemic in an effort to spur economic growth.

An influx of temporary workers, international students and refugees helped push the country’s population from 38 million to 41 million in three years. Critics say it has increased existing competition for housing, healthcare and education.

Trudeau’s approval ratings continued to drop. Then Trump won reelection.

The incoming U.S. leader announced that on his first day in office he planned to levy a 25% tariff on goods from Canada and Mexico unless the countries curbed the flow of undocumented migrants and drugs into the United States.

Though many analysts believe Trump may be using the threat of tariffs as a negotiating tactic before he returns to the White House, the issue has caused deep anxiety in Canada.

It has also prompted a debate about what is the smartest strategy for Canada to deal with the pugnacious American leader: pushing back or taking a more conciliatory approach.

Trudeau appears to have chosen the second option. Last month he flew to Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida to dine with the president-elect. Then, in an apparent attempt to appease the incoming U.S. leader, Trudeau’s government announced a plan to beef up security along the U.S. border.

Freeland, on the other hand, has advocated a much tougher approach to Trump, one more in line with the stern response of Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum.

“A division over how to respond to the U.S. is front and center in the rationale for Freeland leaving,” said Christopher Sands, head of the Canada Institute at the Wilson Center think tank in Washington.

Freeland’s resignation on Monday, when she was scheduled to deliver a key address on the country’s budget, “really shook the government,” Sands said. “I think this may hasten the end of the Trudeau government.”

Analysts say there are several possible outcomes for the current political crisis.

Trudeau could be forced by his own party to step down as leader of the Liberals, who would choose a new leader. Freeland is considered a possible pick. The Liberals would eventually have to call a new election, but their hope would be that a new leader at the top would help reduce their likely losses to the Conservatives, whom polls show with a large lead.

Alternatively, Trudeau could call for an election and lead the Liberals to the polls himself. This is what he says he intends to do.

Or the opposition parties in Parliament could introduce a no-confidence vote, which would trigger new elections. But their attempts to do so have so far failed.

Jonathan Malloy, a professor of political science at Carleton University, said it seems Trudeau’s days are numbered. “There’s a lot of pessimism and people are upset at government,” he said.

And Trump calling Canada the 51st state isn’t helping.

“It’s fair to say that Mr. Trump has a knack for finding people’s weak spots,” Malloy said. “And he struck directly at the main one in Canada, which is that the United States just views it as essentially the 51st state.”

Times staff writer Tracy Wilkinson in the Washington bureau contributed to this report.

WASHINGTON —  The rivalry between California and Florida reached a high mark in November 2023 when Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, faced off against Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, on Fox News over which state held a better model for the country.

Thirteen months later, DeSantis has left the national stage after an aborted presidential run. But his state is winning the political war.

The nation under President-elect Donald Trump will look far more like Trump’s adopted home state of Florida, after he defeated Vice President Kamala Harris by painting her as an out-of-touch California liberal.

Trump is stocking his Cabinet with Floridians. And his plans to reverse California’s policies on the environment, crime, homelessness and education are facing far less pushback than they did during his first term, thanks to the state’s diminishing clout in Congress and a system of checks on Trump’s power that has eroded.

“These are all folks born and raised in our state and are going to show America our type of leadership,” said Brian Ballard, a powerful Florida lobbyist and Republican fundraiser whose firm previously employed Trump’s incoming chief of staff, Susie Wiles, and still employs his nominee for attorney general, Pam Bondi, Florida’s former attorney general. (Ballard’s expanded footprint now includes offices in Washington and West Los Angeles, opened two years ago, another sign of his state’s incursion.)

Other high-level Floridians likely to be in Trump’s inner circle include Sen. Marco Rubio, Trump’s pick for secretary of State, and Rep. Mike Waltz, his choice as national security advisor.

Two prominent people in Trump’s orbit with California ties, advisors Elon Musk and Stephen Miller, are sharp critics of the state’s business and immigration policies, which they have pledged to help Trump reverse.

Their unified efforts are expected to unleash a continuation of fights that began eight years ago during Trump’s first term, when he sought to halt California’s policies providing sanctuary for immigrants who came to the country illegally, slash its authority to set environmental policies such as automobile fuel standards, alter water policy to benefit farmers and suspend aid after wildfires.

He was thwarted in many of those efforts by regulators, advisors who found ways to change his mind, courts and former Speaker Nancy Pelosi, the San Francisco Democrat who proved his most formidable adversary.

Democratic attorneys general filed a record 155 lawsuits against the first Trump administration, winning 83% of cases, according to a tally by Paul Nolette, a political science professor at Marquette University. California was involved in more than 100 such lawsuits.

But Trump has picked staffers for his second term who are less likely to push back against his wishes. The Supreme Court has grown more deferential to Trump, who appointed three of its nine members. And Pelosi is no longer leading her party, while Republicans won control of both the House and Senate in last month’s election.

California Democrats’ best defense appears to be Republican dysfunction, as demonstrated by the party’s struggles last week to pass a bill in the GOP-controlled House that would avoid a government shutdown.

Trump, meanwhile, has vowed to fight the state this time on a variety of fronts, including its homeless policies, its resistance to a border wall, its electric car mandate and his plans to begin mass deportations that would disproportionately affect California, a border state with the nation’s largest Latino population.

Newsom, who declined an interview request, has vowed to continue the fight against Trump’s policies but without what he called “a resistance brand” that defined his earlier clashes. Other Democrats have approached Trump’s second term with more conciliatory rhetoric as the party struggles to coalesce around strategy.

Former Sen. Barbara Boxer, a Democrat who helped define the party’s liberal wing for decades, argues that Trump will incite his own backlash by overreaching.

“Bring it on,” she said.

“People just decided they weren’t feeling happy about things,” she added. “They didn’t vote on the issues that are now going to hit them in the face,” she said, citing a list of policies from Trump’s allies that could lead to workers losing overtime and residents losing breathable air.

But even if Trump’s policies help Democrats politically, they may have a deep impact on Californians.

Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta, who began preparing potential lawsuits months before the election, said he expects to battle the incoming administration over immigration, climate, reproductive rights, gun safety, democracy-related issues and civil rights. He acknowledged the Supreme Court’s rightward turn but pointed out that most decisions are made by trial and circuit court judges.

“We can and will prevail, and we have prevailed in front of the U.S. Supreme Court,” he said.

Bonta, who is considering a run for governor in 2026, argued that voters were choosing Trump the man — narrowly — rather than a single state’s governing model.

“The Florida model? You mean Matt Gaetz or DeSantis or Pam Bondi?” he said, referring to the former House member who withdrew from consideration as attorney general over allegations of sexual misconduct with minors, along with the governor and current attorney general nominee. “I don’t think they’re a model for the future of our country. What else is the Florida model? ‘Don’t say gay’ — just absolutely exclusionary and discriminatory? A formal program sending immigrants across the country as political pawns?”

But Bonta and other Democrats concede the party just lost an election and that Trump, even as he lost California by 20 percentage points, gained about 10 percentage points over his 2016 and 2020 margins in the state.

Much of that growth came among the state’s Latino population, which makes up a large proportion of Democrats’ traditional working-class base.

“It’s all centered around affordability. California is the least affordable state when you factor in housing costs,” said Mike Madrid, an anti-Trump Republican pollster who conducted surveys of Latino voters after the election and has focused on their evolving views for decades. “The idea of California values is specific to cultural issues. It is essentially ignoring economic issues.”

Madrid pointed to policies like Newsom’s plan to phase out sales of new gas-powered vehicles by 2035 as an example of a policy that does not speak to working-class voters.

Most Latinos in the state have to live farther from their jobs, because of the high cost of housing, and pay more for gas, but they cannot afford a new EV or benefit from a Biden administration rebate. The majority of their income is spent on housing costs, which have grown in part because of costly building regulations.

New census estimates released Thursday show California gaining 232,570 residents between 2023 and 2024 after pandemic-era declines. But the state lost more residents (239,575) to other parts of the country than any other state, and saw an increase only because of immigrants from other countries, according to the estimates.

Florida’s population gain was among the largest: 467,347 residents, comprising both immigrants and domestic migrants.

California’s long-beleaguered Republicans are gloating as they promise to work with Trump to dismantle Democratic-led projects and environmental regulations.

Rep. Vince Fong, a Bakersfield Republican who won an election to succeed former Republican Speaker Kevin McCarthy earlier this year, said he will file legislation to halt funding on California’s high-speed rail project and work with Trump to build a border wall in the state, blaming a porous border for allowing fentanyl-smuggling from China.

In an interview, he praised Florida effusively as a better model for business, regulation, environmental policy and housing costs and welcomed the state’s influence at the national level.

“It’s ironic to me that Gov. Newsom and the Democrats in the state Legislature are now concerned about affordability,” he said. “You hear them talking about it, but it’s their policies.”

He accused Newsom of waging war with Florida and the Trump administration for his own personal gain.

“He is trying to elevate himself for his own political purposes and at the expense of Californians,” he said.

Newsom’s office said the state maintains the world’s fifth-largest economy and ranks first in new business starts and private sector jobs. Brandon Richards, a spokesman, said Newsom is traveling the state to expand economic opportunity.

But many of the nation’s biggest business titans are making their own pilgrimages — to visit Trump at his home in Florida.