Trump celebrated his Cabinet nominees, offering praise to each of them line by line.
Notably, the only person he brought up on stage was Elon Musk and his son X. He did not bring up Vice President-elect JD Vance, who was expected to speak but didn't.
At his January 19 rally in Washington D.C., President-elect Donald Trump caused a stir by naming Elon Musk as the head of a new government department without even mentioning Vivek Ramaswamy, a key figure initially slated to co-lead the task force.
As Trump outlined his plans for his second term, he called Musk to the stage, declaring: "We will create the new Department of Government Efficiency, headed by a gentleman named Elon Musk, who's here some place."
Incoming President Donald Trump's nominee for Health and Human Services Secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., is still awaiting a date for his confirmation hearings following a delay over his finances.
The Washington Post reported Sunday that the Office of Government Ethics was still looking into Kennedy's financial disclosures, which he "recently amended."
"Senators traditionally wait to schedule confirmation hearings until that process is completed," The Post reported.
At the dawn of a new Trump era, the same old Trump lies.
The day before his second inauguration, President-elect Donald Trump held a campaign-style rally at an arena in Washington, where he repeated some of the most frequent false claims from the campaign trail while also sprinkling in some new falsehoods.
Here is a fact check of some of his claims.
Trump’s victory in Florida:
Trump correctly said he won Florida by 13 percentage points in the 2024
election. But then he added, “Nobody’s done that ever.” That’s false;
Republican presidential candidates Richard Nixon (1972), Ronald Reagan
(1980 and 1984) and George H.W. Bush (1988), in addition to various
Republican and Democratic candidates in prior decades, won Florida by more than 13 percentage points. Nixon, for example, won it by 44 percentage points.
The 2020 election: Trump lamented what could have happened if only the 2020 election “weren’t rigged,” then added, “But it was.” And he said later in the speech that “they rigged the election.” This is his usual lie; Trump legitimately lost a free and fair election to Joe Biden.
The youth vote: Trump falsely claimed that “we won the youth vote by 36 points” in the 2024 election. He didn’t say how he was defining “the youth vote” — CNN has asked his transition team to clarify — but there’s no basis for his claim by any reasonable definition. While young voters, particularly young men, did shift toward Trump compared with the 2020 election, exit poll data published by CNN found that Vice President Kamala Harris beat Trump 54% to 43% among voters ages 18-24, 53% to 45% among voters ages 25-29, and 51% to 45% among voters ages 30-39. Even if Harris’ actual margins were smaller — exit poll data is often flawed — there is simply no sign that Trump dominated Harris with young voters.
