Donald Trump has sweeping plans for a second administration. Here’s what he’s proposed

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Vance leads behind-the-scenes Iran deal push

Photo illustration: Sarah Grillo/Axios. Photos: Brandon Bell and U.S. Navy via Getty Images

Vice President Vance has spent the past two weeks personally involved in indirect talks with Iran aimed at reaching a new ceasefire and resuming nuclear negotiations, Axios' Barak Ravid reports. Why it matters: Vance's heavy involvement shows he's taking it upon himself to extract the U.S. from a conflict he blamed for the GOP's staggering losses in this week's election. It also elevates the latest round of indirect talks to the highest levels of the administration. 🔎 State of play: U.S. officials and regional sources say that, for now, Trump is willing to let diplomatic efforts play out and wants to see if any kind of deal is possible. But if he changes his mind, the U.S. military is ready to launch strikes on a relatively short timetable. Go deeper.

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🏗️ Trump arch will include "sniper nest"

Artistic rendering: United States Triumphal Arch Foundation A federal court has temporarily blocked groundbreaking for President Trump's towering memorial arch. But pushing ahead, he launched a glitzy website yesterday that rebrands the arch as a military tribute: The United States Military Triumphal Arch. The 250-foot-tall complex is slated to rise in a mass of blindingly gold ornamentation and stately gray granite on the Virginia side of the Potomac River, between Arlington National Cemetery and the Lincoln Memorial, AP reports. Graphic: AP The website features the huge word "Triumph" in gold cursive script reminiscent of the typeface used at Mar-a-Lago. "Inside the two massive columns will be storage for munitions," the website says. "In addition, areas on the pedestal and Observation Deck will be set aside for snipers, countersnipers, and provisions for a sniper nest. Likewise, the open ground area at the base of the Monument will be designed for launching drones and other homeland security assets, if and when necessary." Keep reading.

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Judge wants former US attorney to investigate whether the government misled her in Trump golf case

A federal judge said Saturday she intends to appoint an ex-top federal prosecutor in the nation's capital during President Donald Trump's first term to investigate whether she was purposefully misled by lawyers and administration officials in a lawsuit challenging one of his prized Washington construction projects, the renovation of a historic public golf course along the Potomac River. Read More.

Trump’s grip on his party is in question as Republicans reel from the midterm wipeout

Republicans aren't holding back. Read More.

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First major Miller shakeup

White House deputy chief of staff Richard Walters is leaving the administration, the first major departure in an expected staff shakeup as incoming chief of staff Stephen Miller takes charge, Axios' Alex Isenstadt reports.

• Why it matters: The exit of one of outgoing chief of staff Susie Wiles' allies signals a changing of the guard inside the West Wing, with Miller's team poised to move into more powerful roles.

Walters was one of Wiles' closest political lieutenants, with a relationship stretching back more than a decade. He's a veteran Republican operative who served as the longest-tenured chief of staff in RNC history.

• Walters resigned Friday, the same day that Trump announced Miller would replace Wiles.

Read on.

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Trump's Jensen loyalty

President Trump stood by Jensen Huang last night, telling reporters that the Nvidia CEO is "an honorable guy" and "probably has an excuse" for his infidelity, Axios' Zachary Basu writes.

• Why it matters: Huang has become one of Trump's closest corporate allies, fashioning himself as a leader with unparalleled clout in Silicon Valley, on Wall Street and inside the White House.

🔭 Zoom in: The New York Times first exposed the suspected Chinese espionage operation on Oct. 29, reporting that a woman believed to be working for Beijing had developed a close relationship with Nvidia's CEO.

• The company portrayed their interactions as routine business dealings — an account now under scrutiny after Huang admitted he was "unfaithful" to his wife.
• U.S. officials believe Beijing's top spy agency recruited Alice Huang, an executive at Nvidia customer Megaspeed, to gather information and potentially influence Nvidia's campaign to expand advanced chip sales to China.

The intrigue: The Trump administration reportedly knew about the suspected Chinese intelligence operation long before it became public.

• Trump was briefed in 2025, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio personally oversaw a classified intelligence memo warning senior officials this spring, according to the Times.
• Yet Trump continued to embrace Huang as a trusted adviser, welcoming him to the White House as the Nvidia chief pressed to loosen restrictions on advanced chip exports to China.

🥊 Reality check: There's no public evidence that Huang's relationship influenced his advocacy for selling to China, a longstanding commercial priority for Nvidia.

• John Rizzo, the company's head of public policy communications, said in a statement yesterday: "Today's news will not slow NVIDIA. Jensen is committed to continuing to lead NVIDIA as CEO without interruption."

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Trump says his deportation policy ‘might have been too tough’ for voters in the election President Donald Trump in his first major interview since the midterm elections told CBS’s “60 Minutes” that he thinks his administration was too aggressive on deportations. He added he thinks he can work with Democrats in the new Congress on some kind of immigration deal. Read more.

What to know: Trump said his deportation policy was part of the reason Republicans lost, in the interview that aired on Sunday. Trump did not give specifics about what a deal with the new Democratic majority would look like — and shortly after taping the interview on Friday, Trump named the key architect of his hard-line immigration agenda, Stephen Miller, as his new chief of staff.   “Apparently, his solution was to put the man responsible for it in charge of the White House. That’s not a course correction. That’s a promotion,” Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer scoffed on social media Sunday after the interview aired.

RELATED COVERAGE ➤ Democrats face limits in trying to rein in Trump's immigration agenda Trump says he was just kidding about making UFC’s Dana White his press secretary Trump’s war against Iran not ‘necessarily popular’ but needed to stop a nuclear threat, Rubio says Democrats plan to push clean energy to lower bills and challenge Trump’s fossil fuel agenda Native American women made history in tribal, state and federal elections Still hitting refresh on our election results page waiting for the final calls in Alaska and Mississippi? Sign up for news alerts here, and we’ll bring the latest updates to your inbox.

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FBI is looking at Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang’s affair with an alleged Chinese agent, Trump says

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump said Monday that the FBI is investigating Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang’s affair with an alleged Chinese government agent, but said he doesn’t think the executive who has helped to develop artificial intelligence has a reason to worry.

https://apnews.com/article/china-denies-spy-jensen-huang-nvidia-3345b9f05c54d58909e88f6dcb9c1cd8?

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The Joke’s on Him

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When President Trump posted on Saturday that he’d asked Dana White, the head of the Ultimate Fighting Championship, to be the new White House press secretary, it felt like a callback to the freewheeling first-term Trump.

“I am pleased to announce that the Great Dana White, a violent Fighter and Warrior, has been offered the job of Press Secretary of the United States,” the president wrote on Truth Social, adding that he needed White and his band of mixed-martial-arts fighters “to defend us against the Lunatic Left. Dana will be a Press Secretary like none other. Dana, please take the job!”

By weekend’s end, the possibility of the appointment had dissolved, though not without a subplot of speculation that Trump was confusing the impresario with another Dana White who had actually served as a Pentagon spokesperson during his first term. CNN reported that White had declined, and last night, Trump told reporters he never meant it anyway. “I was only kidding, but Dana loves the idea,” he said.

Perhaps. Trump has a long record of launching outlandish ideas and then playing them off as jokes when they don’t work out. If it was all a jape, then the weak stab at humor seems to underestimate the electorate’s frustration with his antics. If he was serious and got rejected, it’s even worse. An old maxim goes that when the president of the United States asks you to do something, you do it. But Trump no longer has the juice he did in the early days of this administration, when billionaire tech CEOs were showering him with attention and the odd bauble. Last Tuesday evening, as election results rolled in, my colleague Jonathan Lemire wrote that “Donald J. Trump is now officially, thoroughly a lame duck.” Now we’re getting a glimpse of what that looks like in practice.

Start with the cool reception that Trump’s elevation of Stephen Miller to White House chief of staff received among Republicans. Representative Marlin Stutzman called it a “horrible decision.” Another legislator told Fox News that his reaction was “utter disbelief.” When a Politico reporter informed one member of the choice, they replied, “Please tell me you’re lying to me right now, just to get a reaction.” Take these statements with a grain of salt—Republicans have often been happy to talk trash about Trump anonymously while going along with him publicly—but whether or not they acquiesce with the president matters less now that the GOP is so outnumbered in Congress.

One test of where House Republicans actually stand will come this week. Thomas Massie, a renegade GOP member who Trump helped defeat in a primary earlier this year, refiled articles of impeachment against Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth today. Although Speaker Mike Johnson (speaking of lame ducks) had temporarily stymied Massie’s impeachment efforts in September by sending members home until after the midterms, the House is now back in session. Rounding up enough Republican votes to move the articles forward will be difficult but not impossible; a significant number of GOP members lost their seats last week, including many of the more moderate representatives, which means they are less in Trump’s thrall. Assuming that Hegseth is not impeached this month, it seems all but inevitable once Democrats take over. This weekend, presumptive Speaker Hakeem Jeffries said he’s a “hard yes” on impeachment.

Republicans’ losses have produced infighting elsewhere in the party too. As Miller moves to take over, fallout from his predecessor Susie Wiles’s tenure continues. Calley Means, a former aide to Robert F. Kennedy Jr., appeared on Joe Rogan’s podcast, where he accused Wiles and James Blair, a top Trump political adviser, of selling the MAHA movement out to corporate interests. The Wall Street Journal reports that, ahead of their public social-media fight, Blair texted Means, “If you are gonna try to knife me, I’m happy to return the favor.” Meanwhile Senator Ron Johnson, a hard-right figure from Wisconsin, has picked up on Means’s comments to accuse the Trump administration of “corruption.”

One person in particular left somewhat unmoored by the results is Vice President Vance, who built his entire profile on closeness to a politician whose toxicity is now made plain. In a long post-election X post, Vance pinned the midterm defeat on the Iran war. This was widely seen as a swipe at the president and an attempt to position himself for 2028, but as The New Yorker’s Jason Zengerle observed, Vance “didn’t so much throw Trump under the bus as try to bring him on board his bandwagon by essentially putting words in Trump’s mouth.”

But Trump does not seem inclined to cooperate. For one thing, he continues to defend the war. On 60 Minutes last night, he acknowledged the political fallout but said, “I think, historically, this will be a very good decision. Is it a good decision for today and tomorrow? Maybe not.” Speaking with reporters last night, he once again declared victory in the unresolved war with Iran and then claimed, falsely and callously, that “we haven’t lost anybody. No soldiers.”

At other times, though, Trump has sounded unusually chastened since Election Day. He told The New York Times that he looks forward to working with the Democrats. He also acknowledged on 60 Minutes that his deportation policy, which “might be too tough,” could explain the GOP’s shellacking. “I think I got an A-plus for closing up the border,” he said, “but I get hurt because we also took people that had good jobs, that created one violation, or breaking of the law, and that was that they came into the country illegally.” A deescalation on immigration enforcement seems unlikely with Miller as chief of staff, given his role in implementing that policy, but the fact that Trump was willing to offer conciliatory remarks suggests that he is beginning to recognize the challenges of life as a lame duck.

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