Trump made his comments during a Tuesday night interview with Fox News host Sean Hannity. Hannity asked Trump about his dealings with Taliban leaders and the Afghan government as Trump prepared to withdraw U.S. military troops from the region. First, Trump said that he negotiated with Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar Akhund, the Taliban’s co-founder. Trump said he told the Taliban leader that the U.S. troop withdrawal was a “conditions-based agreement....

Comstock, who left Congress in 2019 after losing her 2018 reelection bid, has repeatedly criticized Trump for spreading the falsehood that his 2020 election loss to President Joe Biden was due to massive voter fraud. On Tuesday, Trump fired back, lumping the former congresswoman in with other GOP figures that he has spoken against after receiving criticism. “RINO Former Congresswoman Barbara Comstock of Virginia, who lost her race conclusively to someone she should have easily beaten, now goes around telling Republicans how to get elected,” Trump said in a statement....

Though the outgoing president avoided the most talked about controversial pardons, there is concern that he could issue “secret” pardons that could later be produced to defend against federal charges. Legal consensus suggests Trump can issue a valid pardon without publicly announcing it but this could potentially complicate matters for recipients if they aren’t able to show that the pardon was properly issued and delivered. Brian C. Kalt is professor of law at Michigan State University....

Trump spent Thursday golfing after travelling to Florida for the holidays, shortly after threatening to tank the much-delayed bipartisan COVID-19 relief deal passed through Congress on Monday. Following months of negotiations, lawmakers compromised on a deal worth $900 billion that included $600 stimulus checks—but the president surprised both Republicans and Democrats when he suddenly demanded the bill be amended to include $2,000 stimulus checks in a video posted on Tuesday....

The occasion was marked with solemn ceremonies in multiple locations in Poland. These included the Baltic port of Westerplatte near Gdansk, bombarded by German battleships in the war’s opening salvos. Crowds also gathered in the city of Wielun, which was razed by Nazi aircraft in what is considered among the first of a long list of Nazi war crimes in Poland. Several heads of state, meanwhile, attended an event in Warsaw to mark the anniversary....

Taylor Budowich, Trump’s director of communications, on Monday posted to Twitter an email apparently from a top DOJ national security official saying that the passports had been seized by “filter agents” and would be returned. The tweet, which targeted CBS News reporting, followed a series of contentious exchanges over the FBI’s search of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort home in Florida. Budowich’s tweet was in response to CBS News’ Norah O’Donnell tweeting that a DOJ official told the news outlet that “the FBI is NOT in possession of former President Trump’s passports....

While the size of the president’s Twitter following remains massive, analytics suggest his numbers have now declined for at least 12 consecutive days. Despite the fluctuations, his personal account remains the sixth most-followed profile on the site. Since election day, at least 200,266 accounts have stopped following Trump according to user statistics compiled by social media analytics platform Social Blade. While the president attracted a vast amount of followers in the days immediately after election day—amassing more than 530,000 on November 4 alone—the analytics show that thousands of user accounts on Twitter now appear to be leaving every day....

According to some QAnon adherents, Trump is engaged in a secret war against members of the Deep State which is comprised of Democrats, business people and individuals in the entertainment industry that are involved in a worldwide child trafficking ring. No evidence has been uncovered to prove the veracity of the QAnon theories. At Wednesday’s rally, Trump said that he had been trying to get rid of people who were aligned against him, a process Trump has called “draining the swamp....

His days in the White House are numbered in the wake of his defeat to Joe Biden, but Trump has continued to spread misinformation about the election on Twitter, leading to speculation he could be swiftly banned from the platform after he leaves office. Now it seems at least some of his 88 million-plus Twitter followers may have had enough, with his follower count having dropped for four consecutive days....

The president’s son sent a stark message Thursday to GOP leaders hoping to further their political careers, writing that those who haven’t supported Trump during the election process “cower to the media mob instead.” “The total lack of action from virtually all of the ‘2024 GOP hopefuls’ is pretty amazing,” he tweeted. “They have a perfect platform to show that they’re willing & able to fight but they will cower to the media mob instead....

“He got younger…,” reads the text above the image Trump Jr. shared to his Instagram page on Monday. It appears as though Trump’s eldest son is referring to a tweet posted by far-right activist Jack Posobiec, where the Trump supporter asked, “How is he getting younger?” alongside the same image. “There’s some truth to this,” Trump Jr. replied via his own social media account. “He takes the stress and it fuels him, and in all fairness he took more crap than any other president times about 1000....

The piece of more than 3,300 words pulled no punches in criticizing Trump’s response to the coronavirus pandemic, his refusal to accept an election defeat, and for good measure, it took swipes at other presidential actions this year. Headlined in German “Der Verlierer des Jahres” the article published online on Thursday describes how Trump’s refusal to accept President-elect Joe Biden’s victory is “not surprising,” because, as Roland Nelles and Ralf Neukirch write: “nothing is normal under Trump....

Trump tweeted a query about whether Goodell would allow players to kneel before the national anthem this season after years of league resistance and public pressure by Trump to keep players standing. Goodell posted a video Friday evening saying the league now admits “we were wrong for not listening to NFL players earlier and encourage all to speak out and peacefully protest.” The NFL has been under scrutiny for how it has handled player protests since 2016, when Colin Kaepernick first took a knee during the anthem to protest police brutality and racial inequality....

Political consultants told Newsweek that Trump’s determination to stay off Twitter could help the GOP take back both the House and the Senate in November’s midterms. “Truth be told, most Republican lawmakers would prefer that he not rejoin the Twitter universe, because it will be impossible for them to stay on message if he does,” said Jay Townsend, a Republican political consultant who has worked for four presidential campaigns and a number of congressional races....

Trump’s net approval rating, excluding don’t knows, was -11. By comparison, The Squad—which includes Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, and Ayanna Pressley—who also all had negative approval ratings, were significantly better. New York’s Ocasio-Cortez’s was -3, Minnesota’s Omar was -6, Michigan’s Tlaib was -3, and Massachusetts’ Pressley was -3. The four women had larger “don’t know” answers than Trump, who has far greater name recognition among the wider American public....

Judge Lewis A. Kaplan ruled on Wednesday that the former president must answer questions under oath in relation to the allegations made by magazine columnist E. Jean Carroll. Carroll claims that Trump assaulted her at a Bergdorf Goodman dressing room in the mid-1990s, and later defamed her character while denying it. Kaplan rejected Trump’s legal team’s attempts to have the deposition delayed and ordered the former president to appear for a deposition hearing on Sunday....

Between January 7—when the president’s account was locked indefinitely by the social network—and January 13, Trump’s page amassed 142,170 new likes according to daily statistics compiled by the U.S. analytics company Social Blade. At the time of writing on Thursday, the president’s Facebook page had attracted an additional 6,363 likes, bringing the combined total to 148,533. The last post on Trump’s page is dated January 6, the day that a mob of his supporters stormed into the U....

Hundreds of Trump supporters violently stormed the U.S. Capitol a little over 15 months ago in an apparent effort to disrupt the formal certification of President Joe Biden’s Electoral College victory in a joint-session of Congress. Their attack came directly after Trump told them at a nearby Washington, D.C. rally to walk to the Capitol and “fight like hell” to save their country, following months of lying about the 2020 election results....

The communications consultant and political commentator criticized Trump’s actions since Election Day during an interview with Fox News’ Howard Kurtz, as the sitting president continued to advance his campaign’s unsubstantiated claims of voter fraud and misconduct skewing the outcome of November’s contest. Luntz suggested that Trump’s focus on baseless fraud allegations works to the public’s detriment and disadvantages Republican congressional candidates still campaigning ahead of Georgia’s runoff elections next week....

The Trump campaign and other Republican litigants had lost or withdrawn 50 lawsuits seeking to dispute the election results as of Tuesday. They have prevailed in just one case that appears to have affected only a small number of mail-in ballots. A suit filed by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton asking the Supreme Court to instruct state legislatures in four states President-elect Joe Biden won to overturn the results also seems doomed to fail, based on criticism from legal experts....