Written by 
National Education Association says nominating McMahon as education secretary shows Trump ‘could not care less about our students’ futures’
The president of the National Education Association (NEA) said that the president-elect’s decision to name Linda McMahon as his pick for education secretary in his upcoming administration, shows “that he could not care less about our students’ futures”.
In a statement released on Tuesday after Donald Trump’s announcement, Becky Pringle criticised the naming of McMahon, the billionaire co-founder of World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE), and called on the Senate to reject “Trump’s unqualified nominee”. She warned that “McMahon’s only mission is to eliminate the Department of Education and take away taxpayer dollars from public schools”.
Pringle wrote:
Every student – no matter where they live, how much their family earns, or the color of their skin – deserves the opportunity, resources, and support they need to grow into their full brilliance. In every community across this country parents and educators are partners in this effort.
By selecting Linda McMahon, Donald Trump is showing that he could not care less about our students’ futures. Rather than working to strengthen public schools, expand learning opportunities for students, and support educators, McMahon’s only mission is to eliminate the Department of Education and take away taxpayer dollars from public schools, where 90% of students – and 95% of students with disabilities – learn, and give them to unaccountable and discriminatory private schools.
During his first term, Donald Trump appointed Betsy DeVos to undermine and ultimately privatize public schools through vouchers. Now, he and Linda McMahon are back at it with their extreme Project 2025 proposal to eliminate the Department of Education, steal resources for our most vulnerable students, increase class sizes, cut job training programs, make higher education more expensive and out of reach for middle class families, take away special education services for disabled students, and put student civil rights protections at risk.
She added:
Parents and educators will stand together to support students and reject the harmful, outlandish, and insulting policies being pushed by the Trump administration. They will make their voices heard, just as they did by resoundingly defeating vouchers in states like Colorado, Kentucky, and Nebraska.
The Department of education plays such a critical role in the success of each and every student in this country.
The Senate must stand up for our students and reject Donald Trump’s unqualified nominee, Linda McMahon. Our students and our nation deserve so much better than Betsy DeVos 2.0.”
In a statement on Tuesday, Trump extolled the “incredible” job McMahon has been doing as transition team co-chair and said:
As Secretary of Education, Linda will fight tirelessly to expand ‘Choice’ to every State in America, and empower parents to make the best Education decisions for their families. … We will send Education BACK TO THE STATES, and Linda will spearhead that effort.”
More on this story in a moment, but first, here are some other key developments
-
Trump has chosen Mehmet Oz, best known for starring in his eponymous daytime talkshow for more than a decade and leaning heavily into Trumpism during his failed 2022 run for a Pennsylvania Senate seat, to lead the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). The cardiothoracic surgeon, who faced immense backlash from the medical and scientific communities for pushing misinformation at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, will oversee the agency that operates on a $2.6tn annual budget and provides healthcare to more than 100 million people.
-
Trump is keeping his controversial adviser Kash Patel in the running to be the next FBI director, according to two people familiar with the matter, as the transition team conducted interviews for the role on Monday night at the president-elect’s Mar-a-Lago club. The existence of the interviews, made public in a since-deleted post by the vice president-elect JD Vance, underscored the intent to fire the current FBI director, Christopher Wray, years before his current term is up.
-
Russia on Wednesday accused the US of prolonging the “war in Ukraine” by stepping up weapons deliveries to Kyiv ahead of Trump’s return to the White House. Both Moscow and Kyiv are jockeying to secure an upper hand on the battlefield ahead of Trump assuming office in January 2025.
-
Women’s health advocates in Africa are worried that Trump will again invoke the so-called global gag rule, a policy that cuts off US government funding for groups that offer abortion-related services. The gag rule has been imposed by all Republican presidents since 1984. In 2017, Trump expanded it, cutting foreign NGOs off not only from family planning money, but from broader US global health assistance covering malaria and tuberculosis prevention, water and sanitation, and the distribution of health information.
-
Australia’s ambassador to the US, Kevin Rudd, says Australia is ‘ready’ for a second Trump presidency. In a speech to the Sydney International Strategy Forum via video link, Rudd said: “The team here at the embassy and the government of Australia are ready to work closely with the new Trump administration to continue to realise the benefits of what is a very strong economic and security partnership.”
Key events
Vice president-elect JD Vance has arrived at the Capitol this morning where he will spend the week arranging meetings between Donald Trump’s cabinet picks, Matt Gaetz and Pete Hegseth, and key Republican senators involved in their confirmation process.
Vance will be on Capitol Hill today to usher Gaetz, Trump’s pick for attorney general, around Senate offices as the House ethics committee meets to vote on releasing a report examining allegations of sexual misconduct against the former congressman, the Washington Post reports.
Vance is expected to sit in on some of the meetings, with CNN reporting that Louisiana senator John Kennedy, a member of the Senate judiciary committee, plans to meet with Gaetz and Vance today.
New York representative Elise Stefanik, Trump’s pick to serve as the ambassador to the UN, and Doug Collins, Trump’s pick for secretary of veterans affairs, will also meet with senators this week, according to CNN.
The Biden administration’s move to allow Ukraine to use American supplied anti-personnel landmines comes despite the weapons being banned by scores of countries, including the UK.
Lloyd Austin, the US defense secretary, told reporters: “The landmines that we would look to provide them would be landmines that are not persistent, you know, we can control when they would self-activate, self-detonate and that makes it far more safer eventually than the things that they are creating on their own.”
A US official said it was a step that could help slow Russian advances in the east of the country, especially when used with other munitions from the US.
The US expects Ukraine to use the mines in its own territory, though it has committed not to use them in areas populated with its own civilians, the official said.
The US has provided Ukraine with anti-tank mines throughout its war with Russia, but the addition of anti-personnel mines aims to blunt the advance of Russian ground troops, the official added, speaking on condition of anonymity.
US approves antipersonnel land mines for Ukraine against Russian forces
The US defense secretary, Lloyd Austin, has confirmed the Biden administration will allow Ukraine to use US-supplied antipersonnel landmines to help fight off Russian forces, a further step after Washington granted Kyiv permission to use long-range missiles inside Russia.
Austin, speaking to reporters in Laos on Wednesday, said the shift in Washington’s policy on antipersonnel landmines for Ukraine follows changing tactics by the Russians, according to the AP.
Russian ground troops are leading the movement on the battlefield, Austin said, so Ukraine has “a need for things that can help slow down that effort on the part of the Russians”.
As we reported earlier, the Kremlin’s spokesperson Dmitry Peskov accused the US of prolonging the war in Ukraine and of “doing everything they can to do so”.
The US has temporarily closed its embassy in Kyiv after receiving warning of a “potential significant air attack”, advising American citizens to be prepared to move immediately to a shelter in the event of an air raid warning.
Lloyd Austin, the defense secretary, said women in the US military “make us stronger” as he prepares to shortly exit the top military post after four years.
“I have spent 41 years in uniform, three long tours in Iraq, one in Afghanistan, and everywhere I went on a battlefield, there were women in our formation,” Austin said in an interview with NBC News published this morning.
“I would tell you that, you know, our women are the finest troops in the world. Quite frankly, some of the finest in the world.”
His comments came after Donald Trump’s announcement that he had picked Pete Hegseth, a national guard veteran and Fox News presenter, to succeed Austin as secretary of defense.
Hegseth has made it clear, in his own book and in interviews, that he believes men and women should not serve together in combat units. During a podcast released this month, he said the military “should not have women in combat roles” and that “men in those positions are more capable”.
Austin, during his interview, argued that women “do impact readiness. They make us better. They make us stronger.”
However he did not weigh in on what he thinks about Trump’s choice of Hegseth, only saying that the president-elect “has the opportunity to nominate anyone that he chooses for any position, and certainly, you know, we respect that”.
Donald Trump was attending the launch of SpaceX’s Starship rocket launch in Texas yesterday when he was asked whether he was reconsidering his controversial nomination of Matt Gaetz as attorney general.
“No,” the president-elect told reporters. He did not respond when asked how far he was willing to go to get Gaetz confirmed.
As we reported earlier, the House ethics committee is expected to meet today to vote on releasing a report examining allegations of sexual misconduct against the former Republican congressman.
Former WWE executive Linda McMahon, who has been named as Donald Trump’s pick for education secretary, donated $814,600 to Trump’s 2024 campaign as of July.
She served in Trump’s cabinet in his first term as the administrator of the Small Business Administration from 2017 to 2019.
McMahon chaired America First Action, a Super PAC that backed Trump’s re-election campaign, raising $83m in 2020. She provided $6m to help Trump’s candidacy after he secured the Republican presidential nomination in 2016, according to the Associated Press.
In October, McMahon and her husband, Vince, were named in a new lawsuit involving WWE. The suit alleges that she and other leaders of the company allowed the sexual abuse of young boys at the hands of a ringside announcer, former WWE ring crew chief Melvin Phillips Jr.
The complaint specifically alleges that the McMahons knew about the abuse and failed to stop it.
An attorney for the McMahons told USA Today Sports that the allegations are “false claims” stemming from reporting that the couple deems “absurd, defamatory and utterly meritless”.
US envoy travels to Israel in effort to secure Lebanon ceasefire
US envoy Amos Hochstein said he will travel to Israel on Wednesday to try to secure a ceasefire ending the war with Lebanon’s Hezbollah group after declaring additional progress in talks in Beirut.
Hochstein, who arrived a day earlier in Beirut, said he saw a “real opportunity” to end the conflict after the Lebanese government and Hezbollah agreed to a US ceasefire proposal, although with some comments.
Reuters reports that the diplomacy aims to end a conflict that has inflicted massive devastation in Lebanon since Israel went on the offensive against Hezbollah in September.
Although diplomacy to end the Gaza war has largely stalled, the Biden administration aims to seal a ceasefire in the parallel conflict in Lebanon before Donald Trump takes office in January.
“We are going to work with the incoming administration. We’re already going to be discussing this with them. They will be fully aware of what we’re doing,” Hochstein said.
Trump expected to invoke ‘global gag rule’ on abortion services
As he did in his first term, US president-elect Donald Trump is likely in January to invoke the “global gag rule”, officially called the Mexico City policy, which bans US federal funding for NGOs in foreign countries that provide abortion services or abortion advocacy.
The gag rule has a 40-year history of being applied by Republican presidents and rescinded by Democratic presidents. Every GOP president since the mid-1980s has invoked the rule, reports the Associated Press.
As one of his first acts as president in 2017, Trump expanded the rule to the extent that foreign NGOs were cut off from about $600m in US family planning funds and more than $11bn in US global health aid between 2017 and 2018 alone, according to the US Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of Congress, reports the AP.
The money – much of it intended for Africa – covered efforts such as preventing malaria and tuberculosis, providing water and sanitation, and distributing health information and contraception, which might also have repercussions for HIV prevention.
The policy stipulates that foreign NGOs that receive US government funding must agree to stop abortion-related activities, including discussing it as a family planning option — even when they are using non-US government funds for such activities.
The gag-rule policy “leads to more unintended, unwanted, unsupportable pregnancies and therefore an increase in abortion,” said Catriona Macleod, a professor of psychology at South Africa’s Rhodes University.
“This legislation does not protect life … it’s been called America’s deadly export,” said Macleod, who heads the university’s studies in sexuality and reproduction.
Trump’s transition team did not respond to a request for comment from The Associated Press.
Donald Trump’s re-election as US president has prompted fears that he will cut off American support for Ukraine, forcing it into peace talks with Russia that would culminate in a settlement on terms favourable to Vladimir Putin.
However, as my colleague Andrew Sparrow reports, the UK foreign secretary, David Lammy, has argued that Trump would not go that far.
Lammy and the UK prime minister, Keir Starmer, had dinner with Trump in the autumn. Lammy discusses that too in an interview in the UK’s New Statesmen with George Eaton. Here are the key lines.
-
Lammy argued that Trump would not accept a deal over Ukraine that would look like a victory for Putin. Asked about Trump’s stance on Ukraine, Lammy said:
I’ve been a politician for 25 years and I understand the different philosophies at play. There’s a deep philosophical underpinning to friends in the Republican party that I’ve known for many years, thinking back to people like [former US secretary of state] Condoleezza Rice. Donald Trump has some continuity with this position, which is ‘peace through strength’.
What I do know about Donald Trump is that he doesn’t like losers and he doesn’t want to lose; he wants to get the right deal for the American people. And he knows that the right deal for the American people is peace in Europe and that means a sustainable peace – not Russia achieving its aims and coming back for more in the years ahead.
-
Lammy said he found Trump “very funny, very engaging and very charismatic” when he and Starmer met Trump for dinner at his home in New York. He also said Trump was “a consummate politician” and very interested in learning how Labour won the election in the UK.
Following Trump’s victory earlier this month, Lammy described his previous remarks about the US president-elect as being “deluded, dishonest, xenophobic, narcissistic” and a “neo-Nazi-sympathising sociopath” as old news.
You can read Andrew’s full post on Lammy here.
Trump loyalist Kash Patel in contention to be named FBI director
Hugo Lowell
Donald Trump is keeping his controversial adviser Kash Patel in the running to be the next FBI director, according to two people familiar with the matter, as the transition team conducted interviews for the role on Monday night at the president-elect’s Mar-a-Lago club.
The existence of the interviews, made public in a since-deleted post by the vice president-elect JD Vance, underscored the intent to fire the current FBI director, Christopher Wray, years before his current term is up.
Vance revealed that he and Trump had been interviewing finalists for FBI director in a post responding to criticism he received for missing a Senate vote last night that confirmed one of Joe Biden’s nominees for the US court of appeals for the 11th circuit.
“When this 11th circuit vote happened, I was meeting President Trump to interview multiple positions for our government, including for FBI director,” Vance wrote.
Trump has a special interest in the FBI, having fired James Comey as director in 2017 over his refusal to close the investigation into possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia, and then complaining about perceived disloyalty from Wray.
Patel’s continued position as a top candidate for the role makes clear Trump’s determination to install loyalists in key national security and law enforcement positions, as well as the support Patel has built up among key Trump allies.
The push for Patel – who has frequently railed against the “deep state” – has come from some of the longest-serving Trump advisers, notably those close to former Trump strategist Steve Bannon, a faction that got Trump’s personal lawyers picked for top justice department roles.
That faction has also suggested to Trump in recent days that if Patel gets passed over for the director role, he should be given the deputy FBI director position, one of the people said – a powerful job that helps run the bureau day to day and is crucially not subject to Senate confirmation.