Good morning! It’s Tuesday, January 14, 2025. Inauguration Day is six days away.
President-elect Donald Trump doesn’t take office until next Monday, but the new Republican majority will begin working in earnest this week to have as many of his nominees as possible ready to be confirmed on Inauguration Day.
Here’s the packed schedule of confirmation hearings for the next three days:
Today: Pete Hegseth (Defense)
Wednesday: Marco Rubio (State), Pam Bondi (Justice), Kristi Noem (Homeland Security), Chris Wright (Energy), Sean Duffy (Transportation), John Ratcliffe (CIA), Russell Vought (OMB)
Thursday: Scott Bessent (Treasury), Doug Burgum (Interior), Scott Turner (HUD), Lee Zeldin (EPA)
The most contentious hearing will be the one today, when former “Fox & Friends” co-host Pete Hegseth will answer questions from the Senate Armed Services Committee about his fitness to lead the world’s second-largest employer, the 2.9 million-strong Department of Defense.
Expect Democrats to confront Hegseth about a 2017 allegation of sexual assault (no charges were filed and Hegseth later settled with the accuser), claims that he mismanaged two veterans organizations he led in the 2010s, accusations that he drank on the job while at those groups and at Fox News, and his past comments opposing women in combat roles and supporting naming military bases for Confederate generals.
In his opening statement, obtained by CNN, Hegseth is set to come out swinging — defending his experience by way of questioning the current culture at the Pentagon.
“It is true that I don’t have a similar biography to Defense Secretaries of the last 30 years,” Hegseth plans to say. “But, as President Trump also told me, we’ve repeatedly placed people atop the Pentagon with supposedly ‘the right credentials’ — whether they are retired generals, academics, or defense contractor executives — and where has it gotten us? He believes, and I humbly agree, that it’s time to give someone with dust on his boots the helm. A change agent. Someone with no vested interest in certain companies or specific programs or approved narratives.”
Hegseth, a former Army National Guard officer, will also pledge to “bring the warrior culture back” to the agency.
Barring any major face plants today, Hegseth — along with other controversial Trump nominees like Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard — is currently expected to be confirmed by the Senate.
That was far from guarantee when his nomination was first announced, blindsiding Washington. In fact, after the sexual assault allegation first surfaced, Trump reportedly thought about withdrawing Hegseth’s nomination, and potentially replacing him with Ron DeSantis.
But a constellation of outside groups snapped into action, pouring money into ads pressuring Republican senators to support Hegseth. One key holdout — Sen. Joni Ernst (R-IA), an outspoken sexual assault survivor — was made into a symbol, with conservatives threatening to wage a primary challenge against her in 2026 if she buked Hegseth.
According to The New Yorker, Ernest and other GOP senators have “turned down offers to hear privately” from the woman who accused Hegseth of sexual assault. In conducting its background check of Hegseth, the FBI reportedly did not interview the woman, or either of his ex-wives. (Unmentioned was whether the bureau interviewed Hegseth’s mother, who called him an “abuser of women” in a 2018 email, which she has since recanted.)
The dominant story of 2025 will be the push-and-pull of pre- and post-Trump politics.
In Trump’s first administration, pre-Trump politics won a fair share of these clashes, with the closest shave coming on January 6, 2021, when a large contingent of congressional Republicans followed Trump’s lead in attempting to overturn the 2020 election — but still, courtesy of Mike Pence and a few key others, pre-Trump norms won out.
Heading into Trump 2.0, his way of politics now has the upper hand, and Pete Hegseth’s likely confirmation — Senate Majority Leader John Thune has reportedly told Trump that the nominee has enough votes to be approved — will be a major victory (and a shock to the agency that pre-Trump Republicans hold most dear).
But, in the next week, also pay attention to the concessions pre-Trump Republicans secure as Hegseth and other nominees march through the confirmation process.
Already, in the last few weeks, Hegseth has reversed himself on women serving in combat roles and gay people serving in the military; Kennedy has been forced to declare himself “all for the polio vaccine”; and Gabbard, in a concession to Intelligence Committee Republicans, has been made to embrace a key surveillance tool that she previously opposed.
This is the sort of push-and-pull I’m talking about. All three nominees are currently on track to be confirmed, which will be covered — correctly — as a mark of Trump’s dominance over the GOP. But it will also be important to remember that none were able to be confirmed without giving anything away; all had to kowtow, in some fashion, to the pre-Trump party to secure a Senate majority.
All of this is a good reminder that there are ways short of casting a very public “nay” vote for rank-and-file senators to exert their influence. These sorts of more subtle power plays are, by nature, hard to glimpse, but they can be just as important as the outward shows of opposition that invariably receive more attention. Here, they show us that Trump’s grip on the party is incredibly strong (much stronger than in 2017), but far from total.
As Trump’s picks receive their Senate grillings, note the fact that some of the most controversial nominees in modern history seem to be gliding towards confirmation. But also pay attention to what ground they’ll have to publicly give up — on women in combat, on vaccines, on other issues — to get there.
More news to know
Here — via NBC — is today’s other big news, which dropped shortly before 1 a.m. this morning:
President-elect Donald Trump “inspired his supporters to commit acts of physical violence” on Jan. 6 and knowingly spread an objectively false narrative about election fraud in the 2020 election, special counsel Jack Smith said in a report defending his investigation made public early Tuesday.
The 170-page report summarized Smith’s investigation into Trump’s efforts to maintain power after he lost the 2020 election to Joe Biden, which culminated in the deadly Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. … If it wasn’t for Trump's election in November that prevented the prosecution from moving forward, [Smith’s election interference case against Trump] would have ended in the president-elect’s conviction, he wrote.
“Indeed, but for Mr. Trump’s election and imminent return to the Presidency, the Office assessed that the admissible evidence was sufficient to obtain and sustain a conviction at trial,” Smith’s report stated.
An incredible set of paragraphs about the man set to assume the American presidency in just six days. The full report is here if you would like to read it.
More key headlines:
CBS: Israel and Hamas may be nearing deal for ceasefire in Gaza and release of hostages
AP: Trump team is questioning civil servants at National Security Council about commitment to his agenda
Bloomberg: China Discusses Sale of TikTok US to Musk as One Possible Option
Politico: House Republicans and Trump discuss tying California wildfire aid to debt ceiling
NYT: Elon Musk Is Expected to Use Office Space in the White House Complex
Washington Examiner: Trump calls Fetterman impressive after Mar-a-Lago meeting
The Hill: Biden names Navy aircraft carriers after Clinton, Bush
The day ahead

President Biden will sign proclamations to establish a pair of new national monuments, protecting 848,000 acres of land in California from mining and drilling. The Antiquities Act of 1906 empowers presidents to declare national monuments on federal lands that contain “historic landmarks, historic and prehistoric structures, and other objects of historic or scientific interest.”
Biden was originally slated to sign the proclamations last week in California, but was forced to cancel amid the windstorm that has since helped fuel the wildfires.
The Senate will continue consideration of the House-passed Laken Riley Act, which would require federal authorities to detain undocumented migrants who have been arrested for burglary, theft, larceny, or shoplifting. The chamber advanced the bill in an 82-10 vote yesterday.
The House is set to consider the Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act, which would prohibit schools that receive federal funds from allowing “a person whose sex is male to participate in an athletic program or activity that is designated for women or girls.”
The Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in Thompson v. United States (over whether a misleading statement should count as a “false statement” for the purposes of federal law) and Waetzig v. Halliburton (over whether a plaintiff can renew a lawsuit that they voluntarily dismissed).
Grateful to Gabe for his steady news reporting in upcoming turbulent times!
Aww Gabe don’t you remember that all the orange guy’s appointees to SCOTUS said that abortion was established law and supposedly told some senators in private that they wouldn’t attack reproductive freedom for women? Why on earth would anyone believe that these so called concessions hold any weight in the balance of truth? Let’s not get scammed again by the lies that these folks are more than willing to spew for a vote or two. Let’s recognize that they are disingenuous (a polite term for damned lies) at the least. You appear to be implying that they are real concessions.