The latest on Trump’s presidential transition

In a sign of his continued influence despite a recent internal investigation, Boris Epshteyn was seen with President-elect Donald Trump last night, a person familiar with the matter told CNN.

This comes after an internal investigation into allegations Epshteyn — sought to benefit financially from his influence on Trump — recommended Epshteyn’s access to the president-elect be limited.

More on the investigation: The internal investigation, which was confirmed by half a dozen sources and is not criminal in nature, has probed multiple instances of Epshteyn allegedly requesting payment in exchange for promoting candidates for administration positions or offering to connect individuals with people in the upcoming administration relevant to their industries, sources said.

In one instance, he allegedly requested as much as $100,000 per month in exchange for his services, according to sources familiar with the matter.

Epshteyn’s alleged activities prompted those looking into the matter to make an initial recommendation that Epshteyn should be removed from Trump’s proximity and that he should not be employed or paid by Trump entities, according to two sources.

CNN’s Sara Murray, Kristen Holmes and Kate Sullivan contributed to this report.

An Ikea furniture store in Round Rock, Texas, on February 26, 2024.

The chief executive of the company behind Ikea furniture stores says President-elect Donald Trump’s planned tariffs will make it more difficult to keep its prices low, joining a growing chorus of business leaders in warning of a potential hit to people’s wallets from the levies.

“We believe tariffs will not support … international companies and international trade, with, at the end of the day, that risk turned up on the bills of customers,” Jesper Brodin, Ingka Group CEO, told CNN on Wednesday ahead of the opening of Ikea’s pop-up store on London’s Oxford Street Thursday.

Ikea is the latest business to express concern over Trump’s tariff announcement. A leading footwear industry trade group warned the tariffs on neighboring countries will lift prices on Americans. The trade group represents dozens of companies including Nike, DSW, Cros, Under Armour and Walmart. Meanwhile, shares of General Motors, Ford and Chrysler owner Stellantis all retreated on Tuesday after Trump announced tariff hike proposal on all products coming from Mexico and Canada.

Elon Musk speaks about voting in Folsom, Pennsylvania on October 17.

When President-elect Donald Trump said Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy would recommend major cuts to the federal government in his administration, many public employees knew that their jobs could be on the line.

Now they have a new fear: becoming the personal targets of the world’s richest man – and his legions of followers.

Last week, in the midst of the flurry of his daily missives, Musk reposted two X posts that revealed the names and titles of people holding four relatively obscure climate-related government positions. Each post has been viewed tens of millions of times, and the individuals named have been subjected to a barrage of negative attention. At least one of the four women named has deleted her social media accounts.

Although the information he posted on those government positions is available through public online databases, these posts target otherwise unknown government employees in roles that do not deal directly with the public.

Several current federal employees told CNN they’re afraid their lives will be forever changed – including physically threatened – as Musk makes behind-the-scenes bureaucrats into personal targets. Others told CNN that the threat of being in Musk’s crosshairs might even drive them from their jobs entirely – achieving Musk’s smaller government goals without so much as a proper review.

Remember: This isn’t new behavior for Musk, who has often singled out individuals who he claims have made mistakes or stand in his way. One former federal employee, previously targeted by Musk, said she experienced something very similar.

“It’s his way of intimidating people to either quit or also send a signal to all the other agencies that ‘you’re next’,” said Mary “Missy” Cummings, an engineering and computer science professor at George Mason University, who drew Musk’s ire because of her criticisms of Tesla when she was at the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

Read more about Musk’s public targeting of federal employees.

Donald Trump speaks in West Palm Beach, Florida on November 6.

Global chaos delivered via social media is back.

Between 2017 and 2021, Donald Trump had the world on a precipice, bracing for his next move, gaming out whether his bluster was a bluff, an overture to a deal or a break with history, as he sowed mayhem to push adversaries off balance.

Those days are here again, nearly eight weeks before his second term begins.

The president-elect’s online threats Monday of new trade wars with Canada, Mexico and China turned the United States back into an agent of instability, which can pitch a foreign friend or foe into a crisis in an instant.

Trump said America’s two Western Hemisphere neighbors would be punished if they didn’t stop the flow of undocumented migration and fentanyl across their borders. And he demanded China stop shipments of the drug as well.

His first major global brouhaha since winning reelection posed the following questions that will help define the character of his second term.

Is Trump serious about massive tariff hikes that could increase prices for US consumers as soon as he begins a second presidency, which was won partly because voters were so frustrated with inflation and costs of housing and groceries?

Or is the president-elect indulging his view that life and politics is one big real estate deal? And is he setting out an extreme position to create leverage for agreements that might be modest but polish his dealmaker’s brand?

There’s a third possibility — that Trump feels liberated by his election victory and is determined to drive his America First project further than a first term in which his most volatile instincts were often restrained by establishment aides.

Read Collinson’s full analysis.

The north lawn of the White House is seen in Washington, DC in July 2021.

Three weeks into Donald Trump’s second go-around as president-elect, little about this transition to the White House looks like his first.

By this point in 2016, Trump, unprepared for victory, had announced just four Cabinet nominations for his new administration. Operating out of Trump Tower in Manhattan, the former reality television star turned the process into a spectacle. Republican leaders, Washington veterans, business executives and longtime loyalists competed for his attention and clashed with his family and political operatives in what became a real-world Game of Thrones. The media circus surrounding the protracted audition set the tone for an administration defined in part by its gossip and palace intrigue.

Trump ultimately handed key posts to people he was barely acquainted with.

This time, Trump has maneuvered with uncharacteristic discretion from his palatial estate in Palm Beach, where he has had handed out roles at a dizzying clip, filling most of the top jobs before Thanksgiving with stalwarts of conflicting worldviews. When one nominee faltered – former Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz to lead the Department of Justice – Trump quickly moved on by reassigning the post to another loyalist, the Sunshine State’s former attorney general, Pam Bondi.

And while Trump has taken time to attend an Ultimate Fighting match in New York, meet with congressional Republicans and President Joe Biden in Washington, DC, and pop into evening events at Mar-a-Lago, he has largely filled his days reviewing the resumes of potential department heads and plotting his first moves after he takes over on January 20.

Allies say this more determined Trump is emboldened by his electoral success and more confident in his understanding of executive power learned from his first four years in Washington. He is also acutely aware that his window to act in his second four-year term will run up against Congress’ glacial pace, even if he starts with the GOP controlling both chambers.

Read the full story.

President-elect Donald Trump’s team signed a key agreement with the White House unlocking transition briefings and activities after a lengthy delay amid concerns, in part, over a mandatory ethics agreement.

The White House agreement, which was due October 1, serves as the gatekeeper for access to agencies and information and could lay groundwork for Trump’s team to receive security clearances necessary to begin receiving classified information, though it was not immediately clear how that information sharing with the Biden administration would proceed.

White House spokesperson Saloni Sharma confirmed Trump’s team signed the White House memorandum of understanding, adding that the Biden White House and General Services Administration “repeatedly made the case” to Trump’s team to sign the pair of agreements starting in September.

Catch up on the latest headlines from the transition:

Additionally, Trump announced a flurry of picks in his administration Tuesday:

During President-elect Donald Trump’s first term, America launched an all-out trade war with China to boost US manufacturing, secure US national security interests and resolve what Trump believed was an extremely out-of-balance trade relationship.

President Joe Biden kept most of those tariffs in place and added a few new ones, too. While leaders of the two nations continue to butt heads, US consumers have paid the price, shelling out more money on goods imported from China.

Now Trump is focusing his attention on America’s largest and third-largest trading partners: Mexico and Canada. And he’s pledging something extraordinary: Come January 20, the day Trump is inaugurated, he pledged to slap a new 25% across-the-board tariff on all goods the US imports from the two nations — goods that are almost all coming across the border for free because of the Trump-negotiated US-Mexico-Canada Agreement, or USMCA.

Translation: Brace yourself for a potential trade war that could seriously lighten your wallet.

Some of the top consumer goods Americans buy from their neighbors to the north and south — including gas, produce and cars — could get more expensive if Trump follows through with his tariff plan.

Read more on potential rising costs here.

Shipping containers are seen at Nanjing port in Nanjing, in eastern China's Jiangsu province on October 17, 2024.

In 2018, the United States Trade Representative (USTR) launched a tariff exclusion process that would allow businesses to apply to have certain products shielded from the levies on China.

To win a badly sought-after and potentially lucrative exclusion, companies were asked to demonstrate that the tariffs would cause “severe economic harm” to the firm or US interests. They also were asked to prove that substitute products were not available outside China or that the product wasn’t strategically important to China.

Between 2018 and 2020, USTR received about 53,000 exclusion requests and denied 87% of them, according to a Government Accountability Office review.

The GAO review found “inconsistencies” in how USTR reviewed applications and that the agency “did not fully document all of its internal procedures.”

Relatedly, the Commerce Department’s inspector general in 2019 found shortfalls with a separate exclusion process run by that agency for Section 232 tariffs on other countries besides China. The review found “a lack of transparency that contributes to the appearance of improper influence in decision-making for tariff exclusion requests.” A subsequent inspector general report released in 2021 concluded that US companies were “denied exclusions based on incomplete and contradictory information.”

The murky and unpredictable nature of the process during the last Trump administration is making some fear exclusions will be used as a way to curry favor with special interests.

Read more about how the tariffs impacted workers during the last Trump administration here.