Trump acknowledges 'new administration' – as it happened

Joe Biden has announced a slew of new cabinet nominations on Thursday evening.

The president-elect plans to nominate Boston mayor Marty Walsh for labor secretary. Walsh, a Democrat, is a former union worker and has served as the mayor of Boston since 2014.

Biden also selected Rhode Island governor Gina Raimondo to be the commerce secretary. And he tapped Isabel Guzman, a California small-business advocate, to lead the Small Business Administration.

Biden is expected to formally introduce the nominees at a public event on Friday.

Education secretary Betsy DeVos has resigned, the Wall Street Journal reports, saying the violence on Capitol Hill Wednesday was an “inflection point”.

“There is no mistaking the impact your rhetoric had on the situation, and it is the inflection point for me,” DeVos wrote in her resignation letter to Trump, according to the AP.

DeVos is the second cabinet member, after transportation secretary Elaine Chao, to step down since Donald Trump incited a violent mob to storm the US Capitol in an attempt to overthrow the presidential election.

DeVos was one of Trump’s longest-serving cabinet members, and one of the few remaining who were confirmed by the US Senate.

Trump’s cabinet has been under intense scrutiny since the riot yesterday prompted demands for it to invoke the 25th amendment and remove Trump from power. By resigning less than two weeks before the end of Trump’s term, DeVos will recuse herself from having to make that decision.

Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer placed a telephone call to Mike Pence to “urge him to invoke the 25th Amendment” earlier today, and have not yet heard back, the Speaker of the House and Senate minority leader said in a joint statement.

The Democratic leaders said earlier on Thursday that if the vice president and the Cabinet refused to remove Donald Trump from office, they would pursue an unprecedented second impeachment of the president.

Here is their full statement:

This morning, we placed a call to Vice President Pence to urge him to invoke the 25th Amendment which would allow the Vice President and a majority of the Cabinet to remove the President for his incitement of insurrection and the danger he still poses. We have not yet heard back from the Vice President.

The President’s dangerous and seditious acts necessitate his immediate removal from office. We look forward to hearing from the Vice President as soon as possible and to receiving a positive answer as to whether he and the Cabinet will honor their oath to the Constitution and the American people.”

The US Senate sergeant at arms, Michael Stenger, has resigned at the request of Mitch McConnell, the outgoing Senate majority leader said in a statement.

Earlier on Thursday, Chuck Schumer, who is expected to become majority leader after the newly elected Democratic senators for Georgia are seated, said he would fire Stenger if he hadn’t resigned by then.

Stenger’s resignation follows those of the House sergeant at arms, Paul D Irving, and the chief of the US Capitol police, Steven Sund. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi had called for the resignation of both Irving and Sund.

The Senate sergeant at arms and doorkeeper is elected by members of the Senate and works as the “chief law enforcement officer” of the Senate, a job that includes overseeing security of the Capitol, Senate office buildings, and senators themselves. The House sergeant at arms plays a similar role.

The editorial board of the rightwing Wall Street Journal, long a bastion of Donald Trump apologists, has called on the president to resign rather than face impeachment or a forced removal under the 25th amendment.

“This was an assault on the constitutional process of transferring power after an election,” the paper’s editorial board wrote of Trump’s actions on Wednesday. “It was also an assault on the legislature from an executive sworn to uphold the laws of the United States. This goes beyond merely refusing to concede defeat. In our view it crosses a constitutional line that Mr Trump hasn’t previously crossed. It is impeachable.”

The lengthy editorial takes pains to avoid conceding that any of Trump’s liberal critics may have been right about his unfitness for presidency, but concludes that resignation is preferable to forced removal:

If Mr Trump wants to avoid a second impeachment, his best path would be to take personal responsibility and resign. This would be the cleanest solution since it would immediately turn presidential duties over to Mr Pence. And it would give Mr Trump agency, a la Richard Nixon, over his own fate.

This might also stem the flood of White House and Cabinet resignations that are understandable as acts of conscience but could leave the government dangerously unmanned. Robert O’Brien, the national security adviser, in particular should stay at his post.

We know an act of grace by Mr Trump isn’t likely. In any case this week has probably finished him as a serious political figure. He has cost Republicans the House, the White House, and now the Senate. Worse, he has betrayed his loyal supporters by lying to them about the election and the ability of Congress and Mr Pence to overturn it. He has refused to accept the basic bargain of democracy, which is to accept the result, win or lose.

It is best for everyone, himself included, if he goes away quietly.

Also calling for Trump’s removal today is the editorial board of USA Today, which expressed a preference for the 25th amendment as the mechanism of removal. “Trump’s continuance in office poses unacceptable risks to America,” the board wrote.

While acknowledging that a forced removal might fuel the conspiracy-addled grievances of Trump’s supporters, the paper concluded that “the question is one of relative risks, and leaving an unpunished Trump in office is the greater threat.”

The editorial continues:

Trump appears mentally incapacitated — living in a fantasy world of voting fraud, unable to accept being labeled a loser, checking out of his job even as thousands of Americans are dying every day from the raging coronavirus ... Now is the time for the vice-president and members of the Cabinet to prove they are patriots.

More than 24 hours after he incited a violent mob to attack the US Capitol in support of his unconstitutional efforts to overturn the presidential election, Donald Trump finally conceded that “a new administration will be inaugurated on January 20” and promised a “smooth, orderly and seamless” transfer of power.

The video statement was posted on Twitter, one of the only social media platforms to which the president still has access following his unprecedented and egregious encouragement of rioters bent on insurrection.

Trump began the video with his first straightforward denunciation of the sacking of the US Capitol building, saying: “I would like to begin by addressing the heinous attack on the United States Capitol. Like all Americans I am outraged by the violence, lawlessness and mayhem. I immediately deployed the National Guard and federal law enforcement to secure the building and expel the intruders.”

Multiple news outlets have reported that it was Mike Pence, not Trump, who deployed the National Guard, while Trump resisted the measure.

He continued:

America is and must always be a nation of law and order. The demonstrators who infiltrated the Capitol have defiled the seat of American democracy. To those who engage in the acts of violence and destruction: you do not represent our country. And to those who broke the law: you will pay. We have just been through an intense election and emotions are high, but now tempers must be cooled and calm we start. [sic] We must get on with the business of America.

My campaign vigorously pursued every legal avenue to contest the election results. My only goal was to ensure the integrity of the vote. In so doing now is fighting to defend American democracy. I continue to strongly believe that we must reform our election laws to verify the identity and eligibility of all voters and to ensure faith and confidence in all future elections.

Now, Congress has certified the results. A new administration will be inaugurated on January 20. My focus now turns to ensuring a smooth, orderly and seamless transition of power.

Trump concluded his brief remarks by calling for “healing and reconciliation.” He also included a final message for his supporters, saying, “I know you are disappointed, but I also want you to know that our incredible journey is only just beginning.”

Simon & Schuster has cancelled its planned publication of a book by Josh Hawley, the Republican senator from Missouri who was the first senator to support Donald Trump’s futile and unconstitutional attempt to overturn the results of the presidential election.

“As a publisher it will always be our mission to amplify a variety of voices and viewpoints; at the same time we take seriously our larger public responsibility as citizens, and cannot support Senator Hawley after his role in what became a dangerous threat to our democracy and freedom,” the publishing house said in a statement.

The book, The Tyranny of Big Tech, had been scheduled for publication in June.

Hawley responded to the news in his typical, pseudo-Trumpian style, calling the publisher whose money he had previously been happy to take a “woke mob” and invoking Orwell and “cancel culture”.

Hawley also attempted to recast his participation in an effort to throw out the votes of tens of millions of Americans as an exercise in representative democracy, writing, “Simon & Schuster is canceling my contract because I was representing my constituents, leading a debate on the Senate floor on voter integrity, which they have now decided to redefine as sedition.”

The Stanford- and Yale-educated 41-year-old ended his statement with an apparent threat to sue.

Hawley’s hometown newspaper, the Kansas City Star, has excoriated the senator for his role in Wednesday’s mob violence, writing: “No one other than President Donald Trump himself is more responsible for Wednesday’s coup attempt at the U.S. Capitol than one Joshua David Hawley, the 41-year-old junior senator from Missouri, who put out a fundraising appeal while the siege was underway.”

The chief of the US Capitol police, Steven Sund, has resigned effective 16 January, the AP reports, following widespread condemnation of the agency’s failure to prevent Wednesday’s violent attack.

Earlier today, Sund had issued a statement describing the police force’s activities and acknowledging their lack of preparedness.

“The violent attack on the US Capitol was unlike any I have ever experienced in my 30 years in law enforcement here in Washington, DC,” he said. “The USCP had a robust plan established to address anticipated First Amendment activities. But make no mistake – these mass riots were not First Amendment activities; they were criminal riotous behavior.”

Both the Pentagon and the justice department offered to assist the Capitol police with additional staffing prior to the riot, the AP reported earlier today, but were rebuffed.

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi called on Sund to resign, as did the union representing the police force.

Their leader has deemed the news media to be an “enemy of the people”. So it was perhaps not entirely surprising that the violent Trumpist mob that stormed the US capitol on Tuesday targeted journalists and the press during their rampage.

“Murder the media,” was the message scrawled on a door of the capitol during the siege. Outside, Bloomberg News reporter William Turton captured on video the moment that part of the mob began to attack a group of reporters and their camera equipment while yelling, “Fuck the mainstream media.” As one man brandished a flag pole as a weapon and others menaced, the journalists abandoned their equipment to retreat.

“We are the news now,” said one of the rioters, according to BuzzFeed News reporter Paul McLeod. The sentiment has become common among adherents of QAnon and other right-wing conspiracy movements, who have worked to create an alternative disinformation ecosystem that is impervious to objective reality or evidence-based reporting.

The group subsequently fashioned a noose from the abandoned camera equipment, McLeod reported.

The mob wasn’t the only threat to journalists in Washington DC yesterday. Two reporters for the Washington Post were briefly detained by police while reporting Tuesday night, an echo of the extensive targeting of reporters by law enforcement that was seen throughout the Black Lives Matter uprisings of 2020.

The reporters, Zoeann Murphy and Whitney Leaming, said on Twitter that they were released quickly and were safe.

Leaming referred obliquely to the strain and trauma of reporting under such conditions, however, tweeting, “I have heard from so many journalist friends/colleagues who were at or around the Capitol today that they are ‘fine’. This is a lie. They are not fine but they push aside their physical safety and mental health to focus on the story at hand bc one of the most important rules of journalism is that the story is not about you. Just please remember that and maybe not threaten their life, I beg you.”

Many reporters ended up sheltering alongside members of Congress as the Capitol came under attack. Los Angeles Times reporter Sarah D Wire wrote about hiding in the House gallery during an armed standoff. Norma Torres, a Congresswoman from Southern California, used her Twitter account to send a photo of Wire to the LA Times. The message: she’s safe.

Advocates for freedom of the press condemned the day’s events, noting that the Capitol building is the workplace not just for the country’s lawmakers, but for those who report on them.

“Yesterday’s attack on the US Capitol posed a grave threat to our democracy,” said Bruce Brown, executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, in a statement.

“Rioters at the Capitol called for violence against members of the news media, destroyed news equipment and verbally harassed journalists as the ‘enemy of the people’ — actions that not only pose a dire threat to those working tirelessly to bring information to our communities, but also to the press freedom that is a bedrock value of our nation.

“These actions are the direct result of years of this language stoking fear and hate for one of our most vital institutions. Our free press is crucial to democracy, and indeed, one of the pillars that will help keep it standing beyond this moment.”

As lawmakers and the public continue to ask why the Capitol police were so unprepared for yesterday’s mob violence, the Associated Press reports that both the Pentagon and the justice department offered the law enforcement agency support – and were rejected.

The defense department asked the Capitol police if they needed assistance from the national guard three days before the riot, while DOJ officials offered backing from the FBI on Wednesday, three sources told the AP.

“Still stinging from the uproar over the violent response by law enforcement to protests last June near the White House, officials also were intent on avoiding any appearance that the federal government was deploying active duty or national guard troops against Americans,” the AP writes.

The lack of contingency planning and insufficient staffing by the Capitol police has drawn heavy criticism and pointed comparisons to the agency’s record of aggressively policing Black Lives Matter protesters, or the violent arrests of disability activists during the 2017 debate over repealing the Affordable Care Act.