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Donald Trump has launched a fresh attack on transgender rights as he vowed to “stop” gender-affirming care for minors if he is elected president in 2024.
In a video posted on Truth Social, Mr Trump described gender-affirming care for transgender and nonbinary people as “child abuse” and said he would task federal agencies to police the matter and punish doctors providing such care to minors.
His announcement comes as Nikki Haley prepares to announce her own 2024 presidential bid taking on the former president in a race for the White House.
The former South Carolina governor is expected to formally launch her run on 15 February, making her the first Republican to publicly confirm she is challenging Mr Trump.
Meanwhile, Mr Trump has also had a busy week in terms of his legal and civil troubles, after New York Attorney General Letitia James’ accused him of lying on record in his civil fraud case and released a video showing him pleading the fifth more than 400 times in a deposition.
A Manhattan grand jury is also preparing to review evidence about the former president’s alleged hush money payment to Stormy Daniels.
Nikki Haley is preparing to announce her own 2024 presidential bid taking on the former president in a race for the White House.
The former South Carolina governor and former US ambassador to the UN is expected to formally launch her run on 15 February in Charleston.
This would make her the first Republican to publicly confirm she is challenging Donald Trump.
It would also make her the third Indian-American in US history to make a White House bid.
Mr Trump took to Truth Social on Wednesday afternoon to argue that an “invasion” is taking place on the US-Mexico border.
“Our Southern Border is being overrun at numbers never seen before, or even close,” he wrote.
“251,487 Encounters in December, a Record by quadruple. This is an INVASION! There is no country that can afford or sustain the cost of this, or even close. The Marxists & Communists who allow this to happen are CRAZY. Our Country is being poisoned to death!” he added.
Former president Donald Trump has vowed to go after medical staff providing care to trans children if he is re-elected to office.
In a video released on his social media platform Truth Social on Tuesday, Mr Trump said: “On day one I will revoke Joe Biden’s cruel policies offering so-called gender affirming care.
“Ridiculous. A process that includes giving kids puberty blockers, mutating their physical appearance and ultimately performing surgery on minor children. Can you believe this?”
Read the full story:
Former president pushes for sweeping changes to trans rights at federal level
By this time four years ago, at least a dozen Democratic presidential hopefuls eager to make their case against Donald Trump had either visited Iowa or announced plans to soon visit the leadoff voting state ahead of the 2020 election.
Iowa’s campaign landscape is markedly different this year, with a Republican field seemingly frozen by Trump’s early announcement of a 2024 campaign. So far, only former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson has visited this year, and U.S. Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina is making plans to stop by in the next few weeks.
Even Trump, the only declared candidate in the 2024 race right now, has been absent from Iowa, choosing instead to kickstart his campaign last weekend in New Hampshire and South Carolina, two other early voting states.
With Iowa’s first-in-the-nation GOP caucuses just a year off, the field of would-be White House candidates has largely been content to steer clear of bone-chilling Iowa — and, perhaps more importantly, avoid being the first candidate to announce a bid against the former president.
“No one wants to be on a limb by themselves against Trump,” said Alan Ostergren, a Republican lawyer in Des Moines who is involved in GOP politics. “They’ll all break at some point. But no one wants to go first.”
The new top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee on Wednesday called for more information about the classified records discovered in the private possession of President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump.
Rep. Jim Himes of Connecticut was named the committee’s ranking member Wednesday by House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries. Along with Ohio Rep. Mike Turner, the committee’s new Republican chairman, Himes will lead a panel that has been split by highly political fights in a break from its traditionally quieter oversight of the U.S. spy agencies.
Turner and the leaders of the Senate Intelligence Committee have in recent weeks pushed the White House to share more in private about the classified material found. The U.S. Office of the Director of National Intelligence has declined to comment on its review of classified material, which is also the subject of multiple Justice Department investigations.
“There’s a strong bipartisan concern that Congress is not being briefed on even preliminary reviews of classified information that might have been exposed,” Himes said in an interview Wednesday with The Associated Press. “That’s wrong. That’s wrong as a matter of law.”
The intelligence committees already face several major tests this year, from multiple discoveries of top leaders keeping classified documents to the fight over whether to renew foreign surveillance powers used by the FBI, National Security Agency and other spy agencies.
The new top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee is calling for more information about classified records discovered in the possession of President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump
House Republicans on Wednesday began their promised aggressive oversight of the Biden administration, focusing on what watchdogs described as “indications of widespread fraud” in federal coronavirus aid programs initiated under President Donald Trump.
GOP lawmakers complained that too little attention was paid to the problems when Democrats controlled Congress. Democrats blamed the Trump administration for much of the mess.
More than 1,000 people have pleaded guilty or have been convicted on federal charges of defrauding the myriad COVID-19 relief programs that Congress established in the early days of the pandemic. More than 600 other people and entities face federal fraud charges.
But that’s just the start, according to investigators who testified as the House Oversight and Accountability Committee held its first hearing in the new Congress on fraud and waste in federal pandemic spending. Congress approved about $4.6 trillion in spending from six coronavirus relief laws, beginning in March 2020, when Trump was in the White House and including the $1.9 trillion package that Democrats passed in the first months of the Biden presidency.
“We owe it to the American people to get to the bottom of the greatest theft of American taxpayer dollars in history,” said Rep. James Comer, R-Ky., the committee chairman.
Read more:
More than 1,000 people have pleaded guilty or have been convicted of federal charges of defrauding the myriad COVID-19 relief programs that Congress established in the early days of the pandemic
Former President Donald Trump’s political operation started the year with about $25 million socked away for his recently launched 2024 presidential campaign, a sum that is substantially less than what he had on hand just one year ago, new campaign finance reports show.
The diminished sum, which is spread out across four campaign committees, is far less than the $105 million that Trump reported at the start of 2022. It speaks to the potential challenges for Trump as he mounts his third bid for the presidency facing what is likely to be a crowded field of GOP candidates who will also be vying for campaign cash from the party’s donors.
Across his political committees, including his main campaign account, Trump raised $9.5 million since launching his bid on Nov. 15, according to his campaign, a far cry from the gargantuan sums his campaign boasted of raising in a matter of days — or even hours — back when he was still president.
New campaign finance reports show that former President Donald Trump’s political operation started this year with about $25 million socked away for his recently launched presidential campaign
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Former President Donald Trump speaks at a campaign event at the South Carolina Statehouse
AP
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