The Stock Market and TV: Trump’s Most Durable Guardrails
The New York Times
The curbs on President-elect Donald J. Trump’s impulses are mostly gone, but the old standbys are still in effect, people close to him say.
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When Donald J. Trump rang the opening bell at the New York Stock Exchange on Thursday with news cameras rolling, the moment perfectly captured two of the president-elect’s biggest obsessions: the stock market and television.
Mr. Trump’s fear of falling markets and bad imagery on TV may serve as more formidable checks on some of his more aggressive policies, like mass deportations and sweeping tariffs on trade with China, than any institutional restraints he may face in Washington.
Those guardrails are not foolproof, of course: Mr. Trump has proved himself willing to shatter longstanding political and legal norms in Washington while enduring the crush of condemnation from his adversaries at home and abroad.
But more than a dozen people close to Mr. Trump say he sees the market as a barometer of his success and abhors the idea that his actions might drive down stock prices. And they say he is so obsessed with how he comes across on television that a barrage of negative coverage can make him hesitate, or even reverse course.
One of the main reasons Mr. Trump seriously considered the idea of switching out Pete Hegseth, his embattled choice for defense secretary, for Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida was that he believed it would make for a “big story,” according to a person who discussed the idea last week with the president-elect.
A businessman in the Bronx falsified information on thousands of returns, committing one of the largest tax frauds in Department of Justice history, prosecutors said.
Officials in Wisconsin gave little new information on Tuesday about a shooting that left a student and a teacher dead and six others injured.
The president-elect’s latest attempt to overturn his Manhattan conviction was rebuffed by the judge overseeing the case, who called it “mere hearsay and conjecture.”
Undocumented immigrants whose children or spouses are U.S. citizens are feeling particularly vulnerable to President-elect Donald J. Trump’s threats to push them out.
The man whom authorities call a serial killer was charged with second-degree murder in the case of Valerie Mack, who disappeared in 2000.
The Commerce Department is banning the few remaining operations of China Telecom in the United States, a move that appears unlikely to deter Beijing from conducting sophisticated cyberoperations.
The police in Wisconsin are working to establish a motive for the attack, which left a student and teacher dead and six others injured.
The defendant, Rex Heuermann, is due in court Tuesday. Investigators have been trying to tie him to other unsolved killings on Long Island.
Some Republicans have said that a constitutional convention is overdue. Many Democratic-led states have rescinded their long-ago calls for one, and California will soon consider whether to do the same.
The New York City Campaign Finance Board voted to withhold as much as $4.3 million in matching funds from Mayor Eric Adams, hampering his re-election bid.
He built Mississippi’s Republican Party into a conservative powerhouse, making himself a regional power broker in the process.