Trump loses latest bid to dismiss hush money case after touting $100bn SoftBank deal

The president-elect has made it clear that he wants to crack down hard on immigration once he’s in office.

But his own businesses keep employing foreign guest workers, hiring more of them this year than any other on record.

Here’s Gustaf Kilander’s report.

With the end of Joe Biden’s administration on the horizon, American foreign policy is in flux.

Donald Trump, the president-elect, remains in Mar-a-Lago for now, but even without a presidential seal behind him has taken to holding discussions with world leaders beyond the typical congratulatory calls that occur in the post-election period.

And it’s increasingly becoming clear that US-Iran policy will be an arena where one of the biggest shifts in the American posture will occur.

A Wall Street Journal report in November unveiled the discussions underway about “maximum pressure 2.0” — a return to an updated version of the hardline policy platform the first Trump administration deployed against Iran with the expressed intention of cutting off the country’s nuclear program and weakening its government and state economy.

In what would be one of his more surprising cabinet nominations were it to come to pass, the president-elect is reported by CNN to be toying with the idea of appointing a Democrat, Florida Representative Jared Moskowitz, to lead the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), which handles natural disaster relief.

It is not clear whether Trump and Moskowitz have met yet to discuss the proposition, which would see him take a leaf out of Kamala Harris’s book.

Shou Zi Chew became the latest Big Tech boss to meet with the president-elect in Florida yesterday, following in the footsteps of Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos and Sundar Pichai, all of whom have sought closer ties with the president-elect since his November election win.

This is what Trump had to say about the platform at yesterday’s press conference:

That came as US lawmakers told Apple and Google to prepare to remove TikTok from their app stores on January 19 after the Chinese-owned platform failed in its bid to delay a nationwide ban.

China-based ByteDance must sell TikTok in the US before that date to avoid the ban, which has been ordered due to national security concerns.

TikTok and ByteDance filed an emergency motion with the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia last week, asking for more time to make their case to the US Supreme Court.

Here’s the latest from Anthony Cuthbertson.

The president-elect had this fairly frank dismissal of Chrystia Freeland after she resigned unexpectedly as Canada’s deputy prime minister and finance minister.

“She will not be missed!!!” he hisses.

Here’s more on what’s going on up there.

The president-elect named another quintet of nominees to his new administration late yesterday, who are as follows:

• Arthur Graham Fisher was named as Trump’s choice to be the next United States Ambassador to the Republic of Austria
• Leah Francis Campos will be United States Ambassador to the Dominican Republic
• George Edward Glass will be United States Ambassador to Japan
• Stacey Feinberg will be United States Ambassador to Luxembourg
• Lou Rinaldi will be United States Ambassador to Uruguay

The president-elect also raised eyebrows at Mar-a-Lago yesterday after marveling at the number of countries that reached out to him following his election victory last month.

“I’ve spoken to way over 100, where they called to congratulate not only the election but also the size of the election and the extent of the victory,” Trump said on Monday.

“They were great. I spoke to over 100 countries.

“You wouldn’t believe how many countries there are. I’m trying the best I can to get back to everybody.

“There are a lot of countries. Literally, everyone called. It was very nice.”

Gustaf Kilander has more.

This is what the president-elect had to say about the matter of unidentified flying objects over the East Coast and the Biden administration’s odd failure to put people’s concerns at rest.

The president-elect, all too familiar with federal indictments himself, said yesterday that he believed Mayor Adams was “treated pretty unfairly” and said he “would” issue a pardon once he had reviewed the indictment against him on corruption charges that was issued in September if he felt it merited it.

Here’s more from Ariana Baio.

Let’s have a look back at the president-elect’s latest meandering press conference yesterday, at which he took questions on a wide range of subjects in addition to making the SoftBank announcement.

Here’s Eric Garcia on his worryinging refusal to say definitively that vaccines do not cause autism during comments intended to ease concerns about his nomination of vaccine-sceptic Robert F Kennedy Jr as health secretary.

He was at least positive about the polio vaccine, although not about mandates relating to it.