Monday, December 23, 2024
House Ethics Committee says Matt Gaetz may have violated state laws about prostitution, statutory rape in final report
House Ethics Committee says Matt Gaetz may have violated state laws about prostitution, statutory rape in final report
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“The article discusses the House Ethics Committee's report on its investigation into former Rep. Matt Gaetz. The report summarizes allegations of sexual misconduct and prostitution involving Gaetz, including claims from multiple women. Gaetz has denied the allegations and sought a restraining order against the committee to prevent the report's release. The report was released despite Gaetz's attempts to prevent it.
The much-anticipated report follows years of investigation into allegations against Gaetz, including that he paid for sex in Florida, where prostitution is illegal.
The House Ethics Committee’s final report on its investigation into former Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., found that he engaged in a long list of conduct that violates House Rules and some actions that could be criminal offenses at the state level.
The committee released its 42-page report Monday morning after a lengthy investigation.
“The Committee determined there is substantial evidence that Representative Gaetz violated House Rules and other standards of conduct prohibiting prostitution, statutory rape, illicit drug use, impermissible gifts, special favors or privileges, and obstruction of Congress,” the report reads.
Gaetz has repeatedly denied any wrongdoing, and in a series of posts Monday on X, he denied having paid for sex. The committee said in its report that he didn’t cooperate with its investigation and that he “routinely ignored or significantly delayed producing relevant information requested.”
Gaetz vacated his seat last month, days before the report was expected to be made public and after President-elect Donald Trump announced him as his pick for attorney general. Gaetz withdrew his bid after more details about the Ethics Committee investigation and other allegations were reported.
Ethics Committee Chair Michael Guest, R-Miss., said Monday in a statement after the report was released that while he doesn’t “challenge the Committee’s findings,” he didn’t vote to release the Gaetz report.
“The decision to publish a report after his resignation breaks from the Committee’s long-standing practice and is a dangerous departure with potentially catastrophic consequences," he said.
Trump's transition team and the office of House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.
A Democratic member of the Ethics Committee, Rep. Glenn Ivey of Maryland, said in an interview Monday on MSNBC that the committee's purpose is "to make sure our members know what they can do, what they can’t do, what crosses the line and what doesn’t. And so I think issuing the report certainly provides guidance on that front."
"We’ve got a lot of people who are concerned about Congress, cynical about Washington and the like," he continued. "I think it’s important for us to be able to show that we are trying to keep our own House in order in this way."
The committee outlined a significant amount of evidence that it says shows Gaetz, as a member of Congress, regularly engaged in sexual activity with women whom he was also paying substantial sums of money. Committee investigators said they tracked more than $90,000 to 12 women over a five-year period from 2017 to 2020. The committee concluded the payments were most likely connected to sexual activity and or drug use.
The committee said that while Gaetz has repeatedly denied ever having paid for sex, when he was given the opportunity to put that claim in writing, “Gaetz refused to respond, asserting that ‘asking about [his] sexual history as a single man with adult women is a bridge too far.’”
The committee said that it heard testimony from more than a half-dozen witnesses who attended parties, events and trips with Gaetz from 2017 to 2020 and that “nearly every young woman that the Committee interviewed confirmed that she was paid for sex by, or on behalf of, Representative Gaetz."
“While all the women that the Committee interviewed stated their sexual activity with Representative Gaetz was consensual, at least one woman felt that the use of drugs at the parties and events they attended may have ‘impair[ed her] ability to really know what was going on or fully consent,’” the report said. “Indeed, nearly every woman that the Committee spoke with could not remember the details of at least one or more of the events they attended with Representative Gaetz and attributed that to drug or alcohol consumption.”
Two women told the committee that Gaetz had paid them for sex, including a woman who said he paid a woman for sex at a small, invitation-only party in Florida, where prostitution is illegal, in 2017 while he was a member of the House, their lawyer told NBC News. Those women were of age at the time.
“My clients provided crucial testimony to the House Ethics Committee at significant personal cost," attorney Joel Leppard, who represents the two women who testified to the committee, told NBC News in a statement, "The Committee’s thorough investigation and detailed findings vindicate their accounts and demonstrate their credibility. Their testimony, supported by extensive documentation and corroborating witnesses, has now been validated through this comprehensive investigation. We appreciate the Committee’s commitment to transparency in releasing this report so the truth can be known."
The report also details a sexual encounter Gaetz was alleged to have had with a woman who was a junior in high school at the same party. The woman testified before the committee that she had sex with Gaetz twice at the party in 2017, when she was 17. She also claimed to have received money from Gaetz, then in Congress, that she perceived to be a payment for sex.
“The Committee received testimony that Victim A and Representative Gaetz had sex twice during the party, including at least once in the presence of other party attendees. Victim A recalled receiving $400 in cash from Representative Gaetz that evening, which she understood to be payment for sex. At the time, she had just completed her junior year of high school,” the report reads.
The woman “acknowledged that she was under the influence of ecstasy during her sexual encounters with Representative Gaetz at the July 15, 2017, party, and recalled seeing Representative Gaetz use cocaine at that party,” the committee said.
The woman told the committee that she didn’t tell Gaetz she was underage, and the committee also said it didn’t discover any evidence that Gaetz knew he was having sex with a minor.
While the committee concluded that Gaetz may be in violation of several state laws, it said that it didn’t obtain “substantial evidence” that he violated federal sex trafficking laws. Gaetz was the subject of a lengthy criminal investigation by the Justice Department, but prosecutors chose not to bring charges.
The Justice Department declined to comment on the committee’s report. Gaetz has claimed that the Justice Department exonerated him, but declining to bring charges isn’t the same as exonerating someone.
A senior Justice Department official told NBC News that the decision not to bring charges was made by career prosecutors, not Attorney General Merrick Garland or other Justice Department leaders.
The official pointed out that bringing charges and prosecuting and proving a case in court is much different from a committee investigation. Addressing the federal sex trafficking allegations, the senior official said the Justice Department would have brought charges if it thought it had a winning case.
Florida Statewide Prosecutor Nick Cox declined to comment on the allegations and referred NBC News to local enforcement authorities.
“Allegations of violations of state criminal law would be investigated by law enforcement in the appropriate jurisdiction, such as a local police department, sheriff’s office or the Florida Department of Law Enforcement," Cox said. "To determine if the agencies in the relevant jurisdictions have received information from the House Ethics Committee or have initiated investigations, you would need to contact those law enforcement agencies directly. Single-circuit crimes would be prosecuted by the state attorney where the crime occurred."
A spokesperson for Washington, D.C, Attorney General Brian Schwalb declined to comment.
The report goes into detail about a trip Gaetz took to the Bahamas with two men and six women in 2018. The committee said it believed the trip violated House gift rules, citing the testimony of a woman who described it as payment for sex. The committee said that Gaetz engaged in sexual activity with several women on the trip and that several women on the trip recalled that he appeared to be under the influence of drugs and that they took ecstasy.
The committee said it found that Gaetz used cocaine, ecstasy and marijuana and says there was “ample evidence” that Gaetz appeared “to have set up a pseudonymous e-mail account from his House office in the Capitol complex for the purpose of purchasing marijuana.”
The panel said he also used the power of his office to assist a woman he was engaged in a sexual relationship with to obtain an expedited passport, with his chief of staff falsely claiming she was his constituent.
Earlier Monday, in an attempt to prevent the report’s release, Gaetz sought a temporary restraining order against the committee and its chair, calling for an injunction that would prevent its release.
“The Committee’s apparent intention to release its report after explicitly acknowledging it lacks jurisdiction over former members, its failure to follow constitutional notions of due process, and failure to adhere to its own procedural rules and precedent represents an unprecedented overreach that threatens fundamental constitutional rights and established procedural protections," his lawyers said.
Before the report was released, Gaetz had repeatedly denied any wrongdoing, noting that a separate Justice Department probe into allegations of sex trafficking ended with no charges.
Gaetz has repeatedly denied paying for sex or having sex with anyone underage.
“In my single days, I often sent funds to women I dated — even some I never dated but who asked. I dated several of these women for years,” Gaetz wrote in a lengthy post on X last week. “I NEVER had sexual contact with someone under 18. Any claim that I have would be destroyed in court — which is why no such claim was ever made in court. My 30’s were an era of working very hard — and playing hard too.”
“It’s embarrassing, though not criminal, that I probably partied, womanized, drank and smoked more than I should have earlier in life. I live a different life now,” he added.“
Sunday, December 22, 2024
UnitedHealth vs. Patients: NYC Man’s Battle to Get Lifesaving Drug Highlights Broken Health System | Democracy Now!
Luigi Mangione, the suspect in the shooting death of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, has been charged with first-degree murder and second-degree murder as an act of terrorism. Thompson’s assassination has brought renewed attention to the practices of the health industry and especially UnitedHealth Group, which reported $22 billion in profits last year. For more, we speak with Kevin Dwyer, who has firsthand experience with UnitedHealthcare denying him lifesaving medication for cystic fibrosis. “The thought of getting this medication that could stop my decline was everything to me. And it was devastating when I got the denial,” says Dwyer, who only got approved after his case became a national news story. “It shouldn’t take this, but unfortunately it does,” says Elisabeth Benjamin, vice president of health initiatives at the Community Service Society of New York and co-founder of the Health Care for All New York campaign.
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman.
Luigi Mangione, the suspect in the shooting death of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, appeared in a federal court here in New York Thursday after being extradited from Pennsylvania, where he was arrested. Prior to the court appearance, Mangione was seen in Lower Manhattan being escorted from a helicopter by the FBI, by the New York Police Department and New York Mayor Eric Adams. He’s been charged with first-degree murder, second-degree murder as an act of terrorism for fatally shooting Thompson on the morning of December 4th as the CEO was walking to UnitedHealth’s annual investor conference.
A newly filed federal complaint has revealed new details about a notebook Mangione had at the time of his arrest. According to authorities, it, quote, “contained several handwritten pages that express hostility toward the health insurance industry and wealthy executives in particular.” In a separate manifesto, Luigi Mangione wrote, quote, “Frankly, these parasites simply had it coming. A reminder: the US has the #1 most expensive healthcare system in the world, yet we rank roughly #42 in life expectancy,” he wrote. According to investigators, Mangione had written the words “deny,” “defend” and “depose” on the bullet casings used in the assassination.
The killing of the UnitedHealthcare CEO has brought renewed attention to the practices of the health insurance industry, and especially UnitedHealth Group, which made $22 billion in profits last year.
We’re joined now by two guests here in New York. Elisabeth Benjamin is with us. She is vice president of health initiatives at the Community Service Society of New York. She’s co-founder of Health Care for All New York campaign. And Kevin Dwyer is with us. He’s a cystic fibrosis patient who’s written about his battle with UnitedHealthcare after he was denied lifesaving medicine.
You have — you’re a family of seven kids?
KEVIN DWYER: Yes, correct.
AMY GOODMAN: Four of you have cystic fibrosis, Kevin?
KEVIN DWYER: Correct, yes.
AMY GOODMAN: So, talk about what happened to you.
KEVIN DWYER: Well, in 2012, there was a new medication that came onto the market called Kalydeco. It was a game-changing medication for cystic fibrosis patients. Instead of just treating the symptoms of the disease, which is previously that’s all we had, it actually started to work at the root cause of cystic fibrosis and the defective gene. It was only for one specific mutation out of thousands of mutations for cystic fibrosis. I started to do research about the medication, about the specific gene, talked to my doctor. My sister then was — went and tried to get the medication.
AMY GOODMAN: And did she get it?
KEVIN DWYER: She got it, yes. I then went ahead with all the same information, because we have the same gene. And I was denied by UnitedHealthcare.
AMY GOODMAN: She also had UnitedHealthcare.
KEVIN DWYER: She had UnitedHealthcare, yes.
AMY GOODMAN: UnitedHealthcare approved her prescription.
KEVIN DWYER: Correct. They denied her at first, and then she had to go through the appeal process. And at the appeal process, she got approved for the medication.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, you’re looking very good now. I don’t know what that means.
KEVIN DWYER: Yes.
AMY GOODMAN: But so, explain what happened, because you were not doing well after you were denied.
KEVIN DWYER: No, I was not. I was at a point in my health where it was starting to decline, and it was declining rapidly. At the time, I was probably about 30% lung capacity. So, I —
AMY GOODMAN: You were put on a lung list?
KEVIN DWYER: Yes.
AMY GOODMAN: To get a new lung?
KEVIN DWYER: Yes, I was just about to be — we started having conversations about getting a lung transplant, a double lung transplant. So, the thought of getting this medication that could stop my decline was everything to me. And it was devastating when I got the denial, because my sister had just received the medication, and I had used all the exact same information that she had used.
AMY GOODMAN: To the same health insurance company.
KEVIN DWYER: To the same health insurance company, yes, UnitedHealthcare.
AMY GOODMAN: And she was doing well?
KEVIN DWYER: She was doing great. Her lung functions went up. She was clearing out the mucus in her lungs much easier, as I was going the opposite direction.
AMY GOODMAN: About to get on the lung transplant list.
KEVIN DWYER: Yes.
AMY GOODMAN: So, what did it take for this to turn around for you?
KEVIN DWYER: In the end —
AMY GOODMAN: These days in America, you have to go to the doctor and a lawyer when you’re sick?
KEVIN DWYER: Absolutely, yes. It took a lot. I went to representatives. I went to doctors. I went to lawyers. I ended up finally going to health advocacy groups. The lawyer was helping, but in the end, the only thing that really got me the medication was it became a national story, and it was on The Today Show. And UnitedHealthcare just happened to change their tune and then gave me the medication.
AMY GOODMAN: But can you explain what happened? The Today Show called UnitedHealthcare and said, “We’re about to run this story”?
KEVIN DWYER: Correct, yes.
AMY GOODMAN: They had denied you right up until then.
KEVIN DWYER: Absolutely, yeah.
AMY GOODMAN: And when The Today Show called —
KEVIN DWYER: Yes.
AMY GOODMAN: — they then called you and said it’s going to be approved?
KEVIN DWYER: Uh…
AMY GOODMAN: If you don’t go on The Today Show?
KEVIN DWYER: Absolutely, yes. There was a caveat there. There was a — you know, the question that was posed to me was, “Do you want this medication, or do you want your interview to run on The Today Show?” So, I said, “Well, of course, I want the medication, but it can’t be contingent on an interview, because they have my interview. They’re going to do what they want to do.” And so, then there was negotiations, and then they finally came back and said, “OK, you can have it, and you can go on The Today Show.” And, you know, it’s —
AMY GOODMAN: So, this is what it takes, Elisabeth Benjamin? One of your steps was to go to Community Service Society. That’s where you met Elisabeth Benjamin?
KEVIN DWYER: That’s where — yes, yes. And honestly, when I went to her, after she got involved, the conversation started to change a little bit, but it still wasn’t — they still weren’t going to approve the medication. But at least she was able to get to some people that were able to maybe change the way they were looking at my case.
AMY GOODMAN: And, Elisabeth, you, too, are a lawyer. You have several advanced degrees in public health, and you have a law degree. This is what it takes in America today to not get on the lung transplant list?
ELISABETH BENJAMIN: It shouldn’t take this, but unfortunately it does. What we know from the research is — well, first of all, we don’t know very much at all, because there’s been a total abrogation by all government to actually require health insurance companies to report how many denials they issue. Some states do. Some states don’t. At the federal level, they’re required to capture this data, but, again, some states refuse to participate or have not participated, including, unfortunately, our own New York state, because it’s sort of required in the Affordable Care Act to report the number of denials and the reason for the denials, but that’s a law that’s not, basically, being honored in the breach.
So, what we do know, from the states that do participate, in this one sort of subset of, get it, 350 million claims — so that’s a pretty big subset — is that about 17% of all claims are denied. What we also know is the rates of denial are wildly random. In one state, it’s 2%. In another state, it’s 49%. So it’s completely random where you live and what’s going on in terms of the regulation of insurance carriers. And the other last sad thing from that same data set that we know is that less than 0.1% — so, 0.1 of 1% — of people appeal. So, the first thing I would always say to a patient is appeal, appeal, appeal, because, eventually, you will prevail, although poor Kevin had the hardest appeal I’ve ever seen.
AMY GOODMAN: But, eventually, you won’t necessarily win, right?
ELISABETH BENJAMIN: You won’t necessarily."
Why the Black American origins of mac and cheese are so hotly debated | Black US culture | The Guardian
Why the Black American origins of mac and cheese are so hotly debated
"In an era punctuated with persistent loss, our culinary rituals are a scrumptious bridge
It stood on my kitchen bookshelf, Sylvia’s Family Soul Food Cookbook: From Hemingway, South Carolina, to Harlem, with its ashen purple spine and gold lettering that twinkled in the November light. In what felt like a taunt, the book’s presence made me reconsider a takeout Thanksgiving on the couch. Since 2021, I’ve lost both parents, which has consumed both my heart and my usual cooking mind, dampening my desire to reach for the familiar.
The cookbook, a portal to my childhood and one of my mom’s favorites from her massive cookbook collection, had a traditional recipe I knew I had to try: golden brown macaroni and cheese. I’m a Black Southern woman and cook with roots in Georgia and Alabama, so making mac and cheese was not something I needed formal instruction to execute or master. But in the past few years, the way I’ve made my mac with a béchamel-based roux and too many fancy cheeses I can’t pronounce was no longer satisfying.
I had started to crave the “old school” way of making it – the way our aunties, older cousins and grandmas made it: with eggs, Country Crock or Imperial margarine, elbow macaroni noodles, evaporated milk and a smattering of sharp cheddar cheese with its characteristic bite and twang.
The online debate about the different ways to make the popular soul-food side – roux or no roux – has gone on for years, reappearing like clockwork every holiday season. This discourse – fueled by posts on X, Instagram reels flaunting gooey roux-based cheese pulls and TikToks of users defending their family’s traditional versions – is almost always intense. That’s mainly because it is informed by the flawed assumption that there is one rightful, authentic way for Black people to make mac and cheese, the culinary centerpiece of many of our gatherings. As a result, the tension goes far beyond what one might consider petty social media arguments.
“These ideas and arguments surface over time,” said Psyche Williams-Forson, PhD, the chair of the American studies program at University of Maryland-College Park, and the author of the James Beard award-winning book Eating While Black: Food Shaming and Race in America. “Part of what I know happens is we as Black people, and we as people, are so unaware of our history that we think everything is new and novel. If we would release that nostalgia and be more informed about our histories, perhaps we wouldn’t have so many devastating challenges in our thinking.”
Only then might one note, for instance, that James Hemings, a formerly enslaved man who became America’s first French-trained chef, is largely credited for bringing macaroni and cheese to the US in the late 18th century. Hemings made mac and cheese in the roux style that so many of us unknowingly returned to in modern times. In the decades after Hemings’ introduction, though, Black Southerners, many of whom had previously been enslaved, used what ingredients they had on hand, creating a more simplified version with the egg custard base, which then led to its widespread adoption as “the original”.
Williams-Forson added that recipes are not static but instead are ever-evolving, changing with climate, available resources, palate preferences and regional variances.
In a video on the innovation of Hemings, who learned to make mac and cheese in France as a companion of his enslaver Thomas Jefferson, the food historian Karima Moyer-Nocchinoted the historical development of the dish. While mac and cheese started off as an ancient Roman festival food, different renditions have always been part of its story.
The colonial-era cookbook The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy had perhaps the earliest recorded recipe of mac and cheese, but another “very popular book” in the colonies was Elizabeth Raffald’s The Experienced English Housekeeper, Moyer-Nocchi said in the video: “She has a recipe that is actually called macaroni and parmesan, where the thickening takes place with a ball of butter that is rolled in flour, a very common way of thickening then. She’s also got cream in it.”
Seeing the mac and cheese commentary online this time around showed me something I wasn’t otherwise aware of: there were others like me looking back to the way we used to make it, reaching for those recipes. Those of us trying to shirk off internalized shame that taught us we needed to make changes – swapping out cheddar for smoked gouda, gruyere or fontina – in the name of elevation. And that there were many others overwhelmed with grief, like I was, that shaped how or what they cooked.
The reasons for this are clear: Black families like mine have seen unprecedented levels of loss in the last four years. A two-year assessment examining the Covid-19 pandemic’s impact on Black children, for instance, reports older Black Americans aged 65-74 as five times more likely to die from Covid than white Americans of that age. Our elders, those aged 75-84, died from Covid nearly four times more than those of white Americans.
This means countless Black children lost either a parent or caregiver during those early years of the pandemic, and many had been the keepers of food rituals within our families. With those generational losses, many of us attach impassioned feelings to a dish that is so much more than just food.
Hemings, for his part, paved the way for all our families’ renditions, whether roux-based or not. Black Southern cooks like our enslaved foremothers and later generations of women like Sylvia Woods, of the famed Sylvia’s restaurant in Harlem, were the true progenitors of mac and cheese.
Though Woods’ restaurant is still open, her death in 2012 crystallized the heaviness of what we continue to lose when it comes to our food and the indelible memories attached to it. Who will capture these culinary heirlooms? Are newer generations up to the task of passing the baton?
Some of those generations are joyously embodying the newfound culinary responsibility, without the heaviness of obligation. Jordan Ali, a spiritual worker from Denmark, South Carolina, believes the commentary online has been interesting to watch. Her two-partTikTok series, Been Country, features her 81-year-old grandmother Rosa Tyler in real time making her mac and cheese. I used Ali’s TikToks along with the recipe in Sylvia’s cookbook to help steel me.
“I felt like I needed to document the recipes I grew up on,” Ali said about her decision to post her grandmother cooking online. “I learned how to cook because I stayed with my grandmother. I was adopted by her and she was my guardian for the first part of my life. It was also a way to honor her.”
Ali sees these recipes as tangible mementos of her lineage, recipes she’s determined to preserve for herself and future generations. “She’s getting older and I wanted documentation for myself, for my children to see, for my siblings to look at later down the line,” Ali said. “It’s not just cooking. It’s really communing with your elders. They’re telling stories, they’re cooking, you’re talking, you’re laughing. It’s an experience. It’s spiritual. This is ritual for me.”
Ritual is also taking things from the past and using them as memory-keepers to fuel how we move forward in the future. In an era punctuated with persistent loss, in times that continue to confound, our culinary rituals are a scrumptious bridge, one that connects us to what can never really be lost or forgotten if we insist on remembering."
‘The great capitulation’: why key US figures are seeking Trump’s favor | Donald Trump | The Guardian
‘The great capitulation’: why key US figures are seeking Trump’s favor
"People from tech executives to foreign leaders and even some mainstream media figures are ‘acquiescing in advance’, experts say, because of greed and fear
When “Justice for All”, a dirge-like version of the national anthem sung by defendants jailed over their alleged roles in the January 6, 2021 insurrection, was played last month at Mar-a-Lago in Florida, guests stood with hand on heart.
Among them was Mark Zuckerberg, the billionaire founder of Facebook.
Although it is not clear if Zuckerberg knew the back story of how this tinny version version of The Star-Spangled Banner was recorded over a prison phone line, his mere presence at Donald Trump’s “winter White House” said it all. Facebook had banned Trump after the shocking events of January 6. Now Zuckerberg had come to kiss the ring.
He is far from alone in what has been dubbed “the great capitulation” following Trump’s re-election. Tech chief executives, media organisations and foreign leaders are seeking the president-elect’s favor through donations, self-censorship and appeasement. Analysts say the surrender is driven by a combination of greed, fear of Trump’s unfettered power and a belief that resistance is futile.
“Part of the shock of the Trump win is how quickly and how many people in various areas, from the media to politicians, are acquiescing in advance,” said Tara Setmayer, a former Republican communications director on Capitol Hill. “People are resigning themselves to self-preservation over the good of maintaining a free and fair democracy and resisting Trump.”
It is an astonishing turnaround. When Trump was impeached in the wake of the January 6 riot nearly four years ago, he appeared to be a political pariah. Dozens of major corporations publicly pledged to freeze their financial contributions to 147 Republican members of Congress who had voted to overturn the 2020 presidential election.
Earlier this year Trump became the first former US president convicted of a crime and had three more cases looming over him. Over the years he has has been caught on tape bragging about grabbing women by their private parts, accused of sexual assault by more than two dozen women and found liable by a jury for sexually abusing the columnist E Jean Carroll.
And yet his victory over Kamala Harris in the 5 November election has seemingly expunged his record in the eyes of the rich and powerful. He returns to the White House with the momentum of victory in the national popular vote, a supreme court ruling that implies presidents are above the law and diehard loyalists in the White House and Congress.
Steve Schmidt, a political strategist and former campaign operative for George W Bush and John McCain, said: “He’s entering office is the most powerful president in American history. He is an American Caesar, unrestrained. Trump has made a threat and said, I’m coming after people, and he’s appointed people that will do what he wants without him having to tell them to do it.”
Many of those who once condemned him are eager to cosy up to an incoming president who offers both a carrot – tax cuts, deregulation, business friendly appointees – and a stick. Trump mused to reporters at Mar-a-Lago: “In the first term, everyone was fighting me. In this term, everybody wants to be my friend. I don’t know, my personality changed or something.”
The New York Stock Exchange welcomed Trump to ring its opening bell. Time magazine and the Financial Times newspaper anointed Trump their “person of the year”. Bret Stephens, a longtime Trump foe, wrote this week in the New York Times that Never Trumpers had “overstated our case and, in doing so, defeated our purpose”.
A parade of chief executives have travelled to Mar-a-Lago to bend the knee to Trump. Along with Meta chief executive Zuckerberg, Apple’s Tim Cook, Google’s Sundar Pichai and Sergey Brin and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos made the pilgrimage. Meta, Amazon, Uber and Open AI chief Sam Altman are all reportedly donating $1m to the fund for the inauguration on 20 January.
Bezos, a onetime critic of Trump’s rhetoric, now says he is “optimistic” about Trump’s second term while also endorsing his plans to cut regulations. As owner of the Washington Post newspaper, Bezos killed an endorsement of Harris during the presidential election. The Post is struggling to find a new executive editor amid fears it will no longer live up to the “Democracy dies in darkness” slogan it championed during Trump’s first term.
Other profit-focused media owners have been trying to build bridges with a president-elect who repeatedly dubbed them the “enemy of the people”. The Disney-owned ABC News agreed to pay $15m toward Trump’s presidential library to settle a seemingly flimsy defamation lawsuit over anchor George Stephanopoulos’s inaccurate on-air assertion that Trump had been found civilly liable for raping writer E Jean Carroll.
The owner of the Los Angeles Times, Patrick Soon-Shiong, has reportedly interfered with editorial decisions, demanding opposing viewpoints be presented alongside negative coverage. Comcast’s plan to spin off MSNBC and other cable TV channels into a separate company has raised further concerns about the liberal network, whose ratings are tanking.
The hosts of MSNBC’s Morning Joe show, Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski, visited Mar-a-Lago in November despite previously eviscerating his fascist rhetoric. Scarborough defended the meeting, arguing that any journalist would take an opportunity to meet the president-elect but he and Brzezinski were being penalised for being “transparent” about it.
Critics, however, were not persuaded. Schmidt said: “If you go down there and you make an expression, ‘I did this for you’, will you come out of the meeting and either confirm that he is Hitler or we were off on that and we don’t have to worry? It seems like the purpose of the meeting was to make some type of deal with Hitler.”
This week Trump sued a pollster and a newspaper over survey results published days before the US election showing him behind in Iowa – a state he ultimately won by a landslide. He has also filed a $10bn lawsuit against CBS over a 60 Minutes interview with Harris. There are concerns that his demonstrated willingness to punish his critics could have a chilling effect.
Setmayer, who now runs the Seneca Project political action committee, commented: “The way some in the mainstream media have already decided that acquiescence is their way of self-preservation not only is naive but dangerous because without that we don’t have an informed citizenry. It’s supposed to be without fear or favor and media is acting out of fear. And by way of acting out of fear, they are giving Trump the favor that he wants.”
Observers warn that acceptance of Trump’s behavior will erode democratic norms and emboldens him to pursue an authoritarian agenda and silence dissent. Some have drawn comparisons with Viktor Orbán’s illiberal democracy in Hungary with its combination of overt censorship, loyal state media and tamed private media.
Timothy Snyder, a history professor at Yale University who begins his pamphlet “On Tyranny” with the “Do not obey in advance”, said: “One worries that in the US regime the censorship part is going to be taken over by people who are a million times richer than you suing you. The threat of being sued by a Trump or a Musk or whatever - a person who already controls the government and the economy - means every ‘little person’ has to be worried.”
Pro-Trump networks such as Fox News and Newsmax, while not state controlled, will be “state proximate”, Snyder added. “But the thing which is closest is the private media which tries to come to some kind of agreement. Putting the moral part aside, if you’re coming to some kind of agreement, conceding in advance is maybe not the best negotiating strategy.”
Anyone expecting to find serious guardrails in Washington might be disappointed. Republicans in Congress have been largely pliant, with signs of easing opposition towards controversial cabinet picks such as Pete Hegseth, Trump’s nominee to lead the Pentagon, and Robert F Kennedy Jr, his vaccine-sceptic choice for health secretary.
Some Democrats, too, have signaled a willingness to work with Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy’s cost-cutting “department of government efficiency”. Asked how she would respond to Trump’s plans for mass deportations, the New York governor, Kathy Hochul, replied: “Someone breaks the law, I’ll be the first one to call up Ice [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] and say, ‘Get them out of here.’”
Eric Adams, the Democratic mayor of New York, has also embraced some Trump policiesand not ruled out running as a Republican in future. Even Joe Biden has backed off from his previous warnings that Trump is a danger to democracy – apparently seeking the graceful transition that his predecessor denied him.
Meanwhile, since the election, a parade of world leaders have made their way to Mar-a-Lago. They range from rightwing ally Orbán to Canada’s Justin Trudeau, facing Trump’s threats of huge new tariffs which have plunged his own domestic politics into turmoil. Longtime opponents of Trump are worried about what the mass capitulation portends.
Bill Kristol, director of the advocacy organisation Defending Democracy Together, said: One reason a lot of us were so hostile to Trump is we thought he would do this kind of thing. He’s not a theoretical authoritarian or ideological dictator, though he has elements of that, but he’s like a cunning bully and mob boss and the system can only resist for so long.
“The guardrails are good but they they need people to uphold them. This is true of the political guardrails – Congress, the political parties, the courts – but it’s also true of the broader societal guardrails: the private sector, the media, and there I would say I’m struck by the apparent speed of the capitulation.”
For all Trump’s claims of an overwhelming majority, more than 48% of the electorate voted for Harris but some in “the resistance” appear to have lost the will to fight.
Kristol warned: “It won’t have the kind of friendly corporate encouragement that it had in the first term. People will have to think more like dissidents and less like we’re the natural majority and Trump just happened to win a fluke election, which was the attitude in 2017. It will be challenging.”