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Robert Lighthizer – a Washington veteran who served as Donald Trump's U.S. trade representative in his last term – is reportedly on the outs with the president-elect’s new transition team and may not join the administration at all, according to a new report.

And that could come with a price for people who valued the economic policies that he successfully saw through in Trump’s first term, POLITICO reported.

Legal experts ripped apart Donald Trump's latest request to have his guilty verdict in New York tossed, in which he cited Hunter Biden's sweeping pardon.

Trump's lawyers filed a motion to dismiss the guilty verdict, handed down by a New York state jury in May. The questionable filing prompted legal analysts to post takedowns on social media and say they expected the judge will ignore the request.

Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-ND) appears unfazed by allegations against Donald Trump's Pentagon chief nominee — and had an interesting choice of words when pressed on the matter by CNN congressional correspondent Manu Raju on Tuesday.

The nomination of Pete Hegseth, a Fox News personality, is currently in jeopardy over payoffs and a newly unveiled police report that details allegations of sexual assault against him, as well as disturbing details about the infidelity that ended his first marriage. Several current and former colleagues at Fox News are now coming forward to express concerns with him over excessive drinking. Even Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), one of Trump's biggest cheerleaders in the Senate, acknowledged Hegseth's confirmation will be "difficult."

Ten current and former Fox News employees told NBC News that Pete Hegseth had a drinking problem they found concerning, and two said they smelled alcohol on him before going on air.

President-elect Donald Trump announced his intention to nominate Hegseth as secretary of defense, but a number of stories surfaced in recent weeks that left Republican senators questioning the nomination.

Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX) called on his GOP colleagues in the House to band together to push through President-elect Donald Trump’s MAGA agenda come January, but predicted there would be “fireworks” if congressional Republicans don’t figure things out soon.

The comments came Tuesday during Roy’s appearance on The Benny Show podcast, where he lashed out at lawmakers in his own party who haven’t embraced the full scope of the MAGA agenda and who he sees as not doing their part “to clean out the entire system.”

President-elect Donald Trump is reportedly set to nominate Stephen Feinberg, a billionaire defense industry investor and major Trump megadonor—despite his lack of military or organizational leadership experience—for the second-highest position at the U.S. Department of Defense, Deputy Defense Secretary. The Washington Post first broke the news on Tuesday afternoon, which comes as Trump’s pick for U.S. Secretary of Defense, Fox News weekend host Pete Hegseth, faces mounting criticism and negative press amid numerous scandals including alleged sexual assault, “aggressive drunkenness,” and financial mismanagement of veterans’ organizations.

Trump has already offered the job to Feinberg, according to the Post, calling it “a decision that could elevate a longtime political supporter with investments in defense companies that maintain lucrative Pentagon contracts.”

New York City Mayor Eric Adams vowed at a press conference this week that he opposed mass deportation of non-criminal undocumented immigrants — but that he was happy to work with Donald Trump's "border czar," former Immigration and Customs Enforcement director Tom Homan, to remove violent criminals from the city.

And anyone who doesn't like that, he said, can go ahead and try to "cancel" him.

Donald Trump's lawyers have submitted a motion to dismiss his New York fraud verdict issued by a jury in May, citing President Joe Biden's full pardon of his son Hunter Biden.

Norm Eisen and other legal analysts posted a screen capture of the filing, which uses several claims that experts said were unsupported by the facts.

A new report detailed how Pete Hegseth, President-elect Donald Trump's nominee for secretary of defense, ruined his marriage after repeatedly cheating on his first wife.

Sources revealed to Vanity Fair's Gabriel Sherman that Hegseth admitted to then-wife Meredith Schwarz that he had been unfaithful in November 2008, four years after being wed.

Donald Trump has used a private company to perform background checks on some of his appointees to serve in his Cabinet and refused to sign an agreement that he would let the FBI do the checks.

That ended Tuesday when Trump's transition team finally signed a memorandum of understanding with the Department of Justice, agreeing to allow the FBI to conduct background checks, reported legal analyst Aaron Parnas on Bluesky.

Several years ago, during Donald Trump's first administration, Fox News weekend host Pete Hegseth was vetted for undersecretary positions, and a Senate staffer for a Republican official worked on the background check. What he found was enough to persuade him against the nomination.

Justin Higgins, the former policy advisor to Rep. Tim Huelskamp (R-KS), told MSNBC that many of the more recent allegations happened after his office vetted Hegseth. He also said that they did a political vetting, not a criminal one, and not one that would examine national security concerns.

Battling the throes of inflation can apparently feel like a full-contact sport.

That was the message from Fed governor Christopher Waller during a speech Monday, where he compared the more than two-year fight against inflation to a tiring bout of sparring in a mixed martial arts cage.

Some Republican-led states that passed near-total abortion bans have mysteriously stopped collecting statistics on maternal mortality over the last couple of years — and some observers suspect it's not a coincidence, wrote Susan Rinkunas for MSNBC.

This comes as reports begin to trickle in of cases of women who have died after being denied abortion care in dangerous pregnancies, despite every state with an abortion ban ostensibly having exceptions for the life of the mother — women of color being the bulk of these cases.