Politics

Trump Picks Conservative Activist to Lead U.S. Media Agency

Published

6 days ago

January 22, 2025

Trump Picks Conservative Activist to Lead U.S. Media Agency

President Trump selected a conservative activist and media critic to head the U.S. Agency for Global Media, making a move likely to fuel concerns that his administration will try to politicize a group of federally funded outlets whose mission is to counter authoritarian propaganda with independent news.

His choice for chief executive of the agency, L. Brent Bozell III, is the founder and president of the Media Research Center, a watchdog group that churns out a steady stream of videos and articles highlighting alleged liberal bias — especially anti-Trump bias — on the part of network television hosts and mainstream media outlets.

The media agency oversees a number of government outlets, including Voice of America, about which Mr. Trump has been particularly critical. Mr. Bozell, if confirmed by the Senate, will manage an agency with a $900 million annual budget, 4,000 employees and more than 50 bureaus overseas. The agency’s networks reach 420 million people every week, broadcasting in 63 languages in over 100 countries.

During his first term, Mr. Trump repeatedly attacked coverage from U.S.A.G.M.’s outlets, calling it “disgusting toward our country” and the “voice of the Soviet Union.” His White House interfered with the editorial decisions of the agency’s broadcasters, and numerous employees at the agency accused his appointees of trying to turn it into a mouthpiece for his administration.

Mr. Trump’s decision to tap Kari Lake, a Trump loyalist and right-wing firebrand, as Voice of America’s director has already raised fears of politicization among journalists there.

Mr. Bozell, once an anti-Trump Republican, had written in a National Review essay in 2016 that “Trump might be the greatest charlatan of them all,” but by 2019 he had counted himself as a convert. His watchdog group has echoed Mr. Trump’s arguments that the media unfairly smears him and his allies (the group published an article on Election Day alleging that broadcast coverage of the race was “the most wildly imbalanced in history.”) Mr. Bozell also co-wrote a book called “Unmasked: Big Media’s War Against Trump.”

Mr. Bozell’s son, Leo Brent Bozell IV, was one of the nearly 1,600 people charged in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol who Mr. Trump pardoned on Monday. Mr. Bozell’s father, L. Brent Bozell Jr., was a fierce anti-Communist intellectual and one of the early architects of the modern anti-abortion movement.

“He and his family have fought for the American principles of liberty, freedom, equality and justice for generations,” Mr. Trump said of Mr. Bozell in a social media post announcing his selection. “And he will ensure that message is heard by freedom-loving people around the world. Brent will bring some much needed change to the U.S. Agency for Global Media.”

The outlets Mr. Bozell would oversee also include the Office of Cuba Broadcasting, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Radio Free Asia and the Middle East Broadcasting Networks. Congress also put the agency in charge of a fund that promotes access to free online spaces across the world, especially in authoritarian countries that control access to the internet such as China, Russia and Iran.

The legislation that created the media agency requires its executives to protect its news outlets and their journalists from political influence, but Mr. Trump’s first term was riddled with efforts to put pressure on the agency’s journalists who produced reports critical of his administration and its policies.

In 2020, Mr. Trump appointed Michael Pack, an ally of his former aide Stephen K. Bannon, to run the media agency. He rescinded a provision that prohibited U.S. officials from meddling in the editorial decisions of its news outlets. The provision, called a “firewall,” made his agency difficult to manage and “threatened constitutional values,” Mr. Pack said.

A federal investigation later found that Mr. Pack had grossly mismanaged the agency, repeatedly abusing his power by sidelining executives he felt did not sufficiently support Mr. Trump. A federal judge ruled that Mr. Pack had violated the First Amendment rights of the outlet’s journalists.

The previous chief of U.S.A.G.M. was Amanda Bennett, a Pulitzer Prize-winning newspaper reporter and editor who became the director of Voice of America in 2016, shortly before Mr. Trump took office.

She served at V.O.A. through most of his term but resigned in 2020, soon after the Senate confirmed Mr. Pack as her new boss. In her resignation letter to employees, she hinted that the leadership change had driven her decision to leave.

“As the Senate-confirmed C.E.O., he has the right to replace us with his own V.O.A. leadership,” she wrote.

Later that year, amid the mounting evidence that Mr. Pack and the first Trump White House had aimed to weaken editorial independence of the agency’s journalists, Congress passed a law limiting the power of the agency’s chief executive.

Such strengthened firewalls for journalistic integrity did not stop Mr. Trump from naming Ms. Lake as the next director of Voice of America last month. Ms. Lake, a local TV news anchor turned election denier who lost races for Senate and governor in Arizona, has referred to journalists as “monsters” and pledged to be reporters’ “worst nightmare” if elected.

Ms. Bennett stepped down from her position as leader of the U.S. Agency for Global Media this month.

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Politics

Will Mexico accept military flights of deportees? President Sheinbaum deflects on sensitive issue

Published

37 minutes ago

January 28, 2025

Press Room

Will Mexico accept military flights of deportees? President Sheinbaum deflects on sensitive issue

MEXICO CITY — Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum hedged Tuesday on whether Mexico would accept U.S. military flights carrying deportees under the Trump administration’s mass-expulsion plans

“Until now, this hasn’t taken place,” Sheinbaum responded at her morning news conference when asked several times whether her nation would consent to Pentagon aircraft returning deported citizens. She declined to elaborate.

The White House has begun using military aircraft to transport deportees, including two Pentagon flights that flew more than 150 people to Guatemala last week.

The use of the military — including the deployment of active-duty troops to the United States’ southwest border — is a cornerstone of Trump’s hard-line immigration agenda. But it bumps up against Mexican sensitivities — heightened by a long history of U.S invasions and incursions — against military encroachment by its northern neighbor.

It is not clear whether Pentagon air assets would be deployed to transport deportees to Mexico. Media reports last week that Mexico refused a U.S. military flight that would have brought deportees have not been publicly confirmed by either country.

The military-transport issue has raised alarms throughout Latin America since a weekend diplomatic crisis in which an enraged President Trump moved to impose tariffs and other penalties on Colombia — a longtime U.S. ally — after President Gustavo Petro denied landing permission for two Pentagon aircraft carrying deportees.

After negotiations, the White House withdrew the threatened sanctions and Colombia said it had received assurances of the “dignified conditions” Petro had demanded. Petro said on social media that he had never refused to accept deportees but would not agree to their being returned handcuffed and on military aircraft.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents knock on the door of a Chicago home on Sunday as part of mass deportations.

(Christopher Dilts / Getty Images)

The Brazilian government also denounced “degrading treatment” of its citizens after some deportees walked off a nonmilitary U.S. plane on Saturday in the northern city of Manaus in handcuffs and leg shackles.

The idea of giant C-17s flying over Mexican airspace and unloading deportees at Mexican airports is a potentially incendiary prospect in a country with a long memory of U.S. invasions; the nation lost much of its territory in the Mexican-American War of 1846-48.

Though Washington has not intervened militarily in Mexico for more than a century, Mexican youth are schooled in Mexico’s “heroic” resistance to past U.S. actions.

Many in Mexico are already unnerved at previous Trump threats to deploy the U.S. military against drug traffickers. His executive order to designate cartels as foreign terrorist organizations is viewed by many as a prelude to direct military intervention.

Already casting a shadow on binational relations are Trump’s threats to impose tariffs of 25% on Mexican imports if the country does not do more to stop U.S.-bound undocumented immigrants and the smuggling of fentanyl. Trump has indicated he would decide by Saturday on the tariffs — which could devastate a fragile economy heavily dependent on cross-border trade.

Sheinbaum is under pressure to bend to Trump’s demands in order to safeguard the economy, but she must also take care not to alienate citizens sensitive to perceived slights against Mexico’s sovereignty.

Protesters in Chicago wave U.S. and Mexican flags.

“President Sheinbaum is in a tight spot,” said Tony Payan, who heads the Center for the U.S. and Mexico at Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy. “The optics of military planes flying deportees back to Mexico would not be good for her nationalist base. But she may not have a choice other than to accept it.”

Mexican citizens are by far the largest nationality among the estimated more than 11 million immigrants in the United States illegally. In recent years, Washington has removed about 200,000 deportees annually to Mexico, mostly via the southwestern land border — but including some ferried by nonmilitary aircraft to the Mexican interior. The number of deportees returned to Mexico is widely expected to increase under Trump’s directives.

Sheinbaum has already agreed to accept Trump’s reinstatement of the controversial Remain in Mexico policy, which forces asylum-seekers arriving at the border — including Central Americans and other non-Mexicans — to wait in Mexico for adjudication of their cases in U.S. immigration courts. She has said Mexico would seek financial aid from Washington to reimburse the costs of repatriating third-country nationals to their homelands.

Mexico received four deportation flights last week— on nonmilitary aircraft — but has yet to see a significant uptick in returned deportees, officials say.

But Mexican authorities are erecting large-scale new shelters along the country’s northern border with the United States and making other preparations to house and otherwise assist repatriated citizens and third-country nationals sent to Mexico.

Special correspondent Cecilia Sánchez Vidal contributed.

Politics

Trump Threatens Tariffs Over Immigration, Drugs and Greenland

Published

11 hours ago

January 28, 2025

Press Room

Trump Threatens Tariffs Over Immigration, Drugs and Greenland

In his first week in office, President Trump tried to browbeat governments across the world into ending the flow of drugs into America, accepting planes full of deported migrants, halting wars and ceding territory to the United States.

For all of them, he deployed a common threat: Countries that did not meet his demands would face stiff tariffs on products they send to American consumers.

Mr. Trump has long wielded tariffs as a weapon to resolve trade concerns. But the president is now frequently using them to make gains on issues that have little to do with trade.

It is a strategy rarely seen from other presidents, and never at this frequency. While Mr. Trump threatened governments like Mexico’s with tariffs over immigration issues in his first term, he now appears to be making such threats almost daily, including on Sunday, when he said Colombia would face tariffs after its government turned back planes carrying deported immigrants.

“The willingness rhetorically to throw the kitchen sink and use the whole tool kit is trying to send the message to other countries beyond Colombia that they should comply and find ways to address these border concerns,” said Rachel Ziemba, an adjunct senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security.

Last week, Mr. Trump threatened to put a 25 percent tariff on products from Canada and Mexico and a 10 percent tariff on Chinese products on Feb. 1 unless those countries did more to stop the flows of drugs and migrants into the United States. Previously, he threatened to punish Denmark with tariffs if its government would not cede Greenland to the United States and to impose levies on Russia if it would not end its war in Ukraine.

On Sunday afternoon, Mr. Trump wrote on social media that he would impose 25 percent tariffs on Colombia and raise them to 50 percent in one week. Within a few hours, the Colombian president, Gustavo Petro, said he would hit back with his own tariffs. But by Sunday night, the White House had released a statement saying that Mr. Petro had agreed to all of its terms, and that Mr. Trump would hold the threat of tariffs and sanctions “in reserve.”

That quick resolution may only further embolden Mr. Trump’s use of tariffs to extract concessions that have nothing to do with typical trade relations.

Speaking to House Republicans in Florida on Monday, Mr. Trump referenced his threat that countries like Colombia, Mexico and Canada reduce the flow of migrants into the United States or face tariffs.

“They’re going to take them back fast and if they don’t they’ll pay a very high economic price,” he said.

Ted Murphy, a lawyer at Sidley Austin who handles trade-related issues, said the tariffs would have been a significant blow to industries that rely on imports from Colombia, but that the implications of the threat were much broader.

“Tariffs could be used in response to almost anything,” he said.

Even having a free-trade agreement with the United States is no guarantee of safety: Colombia signed such a deal with the United States in 2011, while Mr. Trump himself signed the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement in 2020.

Mr. Trump is also not limiting himself to the trade-related laws he relied on to impose tariffs in his first term, Mr. Murphy said. For Colombia and for other nations, Mr. Trump has appeared willing to deploy a legal statute — the International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977, or IEEPA — that gives presidents broad powers to impose trade and sanctions measures if they declare a national emergency.

Mr. Murphy said the bar for Mr. Trump to declare a national emergency appeared to be “not very high.”

Governments in Mexico, Canada, Europe, China and elsewhere have prepared lists of retaliatory tariffs they can apply to American products if Mr. Trump decides to follow through with his own levies. But foreign officials seem well aware of the economic damage that cross-border tariffs would cause, and have tried to defuse the tensions to avoid a damaging trade war.

Kaja Kallas, the European Union’s top diplomat, said Monday that Europe needed to unite as the Trump administration threatens to usher in an era of policy changes, including tariffs.

“As the United States shifts to a more transactional approach, Europe needs to close ranks,” Ms. Kallas said, speaking in a news conference after a meeting of foreign ministers in Brussels.

“Europe is an economic heavyweight and geopolitical partner,” she added.

Presidential use of trade-related measures for matters unrelated to trade isn’t without precedent. Douglas A. Irwin, an economic historian at Dartmouth College, pointed out that President Richard Nixon conditioned the return of Okinawa to Japan on its agreeing to limit the amount of textiles it sent into the United States. President Gerald Ford signed the Jackson-Vanik Amendment, which linked granting the Soviet Union “most favored nation” trading status — and lower tariff rates — to it allowing Jews to emigrate.

Still, Mr. Irwin called Mr. Trump’s approach “unusual.”

“Trump is very overt and transactional in his approach,” he said.

In recent decades, presidents have been less willing to wield tariffs or other measures that would restrict trade, in part out of deference to the World Trade Organization. W.T.O. members, including the United States, have agreed to certain rules around when and how they impose tariffs on other countries within the organization.

The W.T.O. carves out exceptions for its members to act on issues of national security, and governments have used that exception more liberally in recent years when imposing tariffs or limiting certain kinds of trade.

Eswar Prasad, a trade policy professor at Cornell University, said that many administrations, including Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s, had used national security considerations “as a veil to implement tariffs and other protectionist measures without running afoul of W.T.O. rules.”

Although no U.S. president has wielded the threat of tariffs as Mr. Trump has, they have pressured other countries with other types of economic measures, like sanctions or embargoes. And in recent decades, U.S. presidents have been more willing to use trade as a carrot, rather than a stick, holding out the prospect of free trade deals and other preferential trade treatment for governments that support the country politically.

If Mr. Trump indeed goes through with his tariffs, it remains to be seen if U.S. courts ultimately decide to curtail them.

Peter Harrell, who served as White House senior director for international economics in the Biden administration, noted on social media that IEEPA had never before been used to impose the types of tariffs that Mr. Trump threatened on Colombia, Canada and Mexico. (Mr. Nixon did use a precursor statute, the Trading With the Enemy Act of 1917, to briefly impose a 10 percent universal tariff in 1971 to address the trade balance, unemployment and inflation.)

Mr. Harrell suggested that such an expansive interpretation of the law could face legal challenges. He said that he was “skeptical” that courts would allow Mr. Trump to use the legal statute to impose a broad global tariff, but more targeted tariffs, like those on Colombia, would be “a much closer and more interesting test case.”

Jeanna Smialek contributed reporting from London.

Politics

Ogles and other Republicans push federal ban on chemical abortions

Published

12 hours ago

January 28, 2025

Press Room

Ogles and other Republicans push federal ban on chemical abortions

Rep. Andy Ogles, R-Tenn., and more than a dozen other House Republicans are pushing a proposal to ban the provision of chemical abortion drugs.

The congressman reintroduced the proposal that he previously put forward in 2023, according to a press release, which provides a link to the text of the 2023 version.

“Notwithstanding any other provision of law, whoever prescribes, dispenses, distributes, or sells, any drug, medication, or chemical for the purpose of procuring or performing an abortion on any woman, shall be imprisoned for not more than 25 years, fined under this title, or both,” the text reads.

MANY WOMEN ‘UNPREPARED’ FOR INTENSITY OF PAIN FROM CHEMICAL ABORTION, STUDY FINDS

Rep. Andy Ogles at event about The Ending Chemical Abortion Act in Capitol Hill of Washington D.C., on Sept. 28, 2023 (Celal Gunes/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)

The ban would not apply to the provision “of any contraceptive agent administered before conception or before pregnancy can be confirmed through conventional testing,” or to “treatment of a miscarriage,” or to situations “where a woman suffers from a physical disorder, physical injury, or physical illness, including a life-endangering physical condition caused by or arising from the pregnancy itself, that would, as certified by a physician, place the woman in danger of death.”

The proposal also stipulates that a woman who receives a chemical abortion may not be prosecuted criminally.

ABORTION SURVIVORS SLAM DEMS FOR BLOCKING ‘BORN-ALIVE’ ABORTION BILL: ‘WE ARE NOT TREATED AS HUMAN BEINGS’

“Chemical abortions not only end a human life but pose a serious risk to the lives of the mothers,” Ogles noted, according to both the 2023 and 2025 press releases about the proposal.

“I’m taking a stand against the irresponsibility of the Democrats and working to protect women and girls across America. I’m taking a stand for life because, born or unborn, every single person is uniquely and wonderfully made. It’s not merely a political issue; it’s a moral duty to uphold the sanctity of life. I am committed to safeguarding the innocent and voiceless in our society,” he noted.

Cosponsors include Republican Reps. Mary Miller of Illinois, Trent Kelly of Mississippi, Mike Bost of Illinois, Ben Cline of Virginia, Josh Brecheen of Oklahoma, Rick Allen of Georgia, Randy Weber of Texas, Dan Crenshaw of Texas, Elijah Crane of Arizona, Mark Green of Tennessee, Andrew Clyde of Georgia, Andy Biggs of Arizona, Doug LaMalfa of California, Paul Gosar of Arizona, Barry Moore of Alabama, Lauren Boebert of Colorado, Glenn Grothman of Wisconsin, and Mike Ezell of Mississippi.

LAWMAKER UNVEILS CONSTITUTIONAL AMENDMENT TO GIVE TRUMP THIRD TERM

Left: Rep.-elect Dan Crenshaw; Center: Rep. Andy Ogles; Right: Rep. Lauren Boebert

Left: Rep.-elect Dan Crenshaw, R-Texas, is seen after the freshman class photo on the East Front of the Capitol on Nov. 14, 2018; Center: Rep. Andy Ogles, R-Tenn., is seen outside the U.S. Capitol during House votes on Friday, April 12, 2022; Right: Rep. Lauren Boebert, R-Colo., arrives to a Republican caucus meeting at the U.S. Capitol Building on Sept. 13, 2023 in Washington, D.C. (Left: Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call; Center: Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images; Right: Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)

Ogles recently proposed a Constitutional amendment that would alter presidential term limits in a manner that would allow President Donald Trump to seek a third term in office.

The proposal reads, “No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than three times, nor be elected to any additional term after being elected to two consecutive terms, and no person who has held the office of President, or acted as President, for more than two years of a term to which some other person was elected President shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice.”

Alex Nitzberg is a writer for Fox News Digital.