Trump floats taking back Panama Canal

President-elect Donald Trump on Sunday gave his first rally speech since winning the 2024 presidential election, delivering the keynote address at Turning Point USA’s AmericaFest conference for young conservatives. The former and future president spoke for more than an hour and made plenty of headlines with his suggestion that the United States take back control of the Panama Canal, a rejection of the Democrat attack that he is a shadow puppet of billionaire Elon Musk, and a renewed promise of his second-term priorities.

Trump took a victory lap for the young crowd, pointing out how well he performed with youth voters and musing that he might keep TikTok around a little longer since his campaign did so well on the social media platform, which has been ordered to divest from its Chinese-owned parent company or face a US ban.

But his most covered remarks from the event centered on his renewed interest in the Panama Canal. Trump mentioned during his first term in 2017 the United States’s construction of the canal, indicating Panama should be grateful for America’s help with the project. At the time, he was rebuked by the Panamanian president for bringing it up at all. Apparently undeterred, Trump poked at the issue again with his remarks at AmFest. 

“Has anyone ever heard of the Panama Canal?” Trump said. “Because we’re being ripped off at the Panama Canal like we’re being ripped off everywhere else … it was given to Panama and to the people of Panama, but it has provisions, you gotta treat us fairly and they haven’t treated us fairly.”

The United States took over construction of the canal after France abandoned the project in 1889 and controlled the canal until President Jimmy Carter handed it over to Panama in 1977. Trump has accused Panama of charging exorbitant rates for US ships to pass through the canal and claims China has exerted too much influence in the region. The Panamanian president naturally again balked at Trump’s suggested plan to take back the canal.

Trump also batted down assertions that Elon Musk has taken an outsized role in the presidential transition, joking that he is “safe” because Musk cannot be president due to his being born in South Africa. “No, he’s not going to be president, that I can tell you,” Trump said. “And I’m safe. You know why he can’t be? He wasn’t born in this country.”

Democrats accused Musk of being too powerful after he sent a post on X urging Republicans to vote against a 1,500-page continuing resolution to keep the government open over the holidays, spurring new negotiations that ended in a slimmed-down, approximately 100-page bill making its way to the president’s desk. Trump’s brief address of Musks’s role suggests Democrats’ plans to drive a wedge between the pair aren’t working as well as intended.

In addition to making news on these fronts, Trump reiterated his plans for day one of his presidency: ramping up domestic oil and gas drilling, cutting regulations and extending the 2017 tax cuts, getting critical race theory and transgender ideology out of schools, ending foreign wars, carrying out mass deportations and securing the southern border. 

-Amber Duke

On our radar

LOST & FOUND Congresswoman Kay Granger’s family says she voluntarily moved to an independent living facility three months ago amid reports that she went “missing” and was found in the facility’s memory care unit. The family said she did start exhibiting signs and symptoms of dementia since moving into the facility and that her decline has been “rapid.” Granger is retiring from Congress at the end of the year and has not voted in the House since July. 

NYC WOMAN SET ON FIRE The New York Post reports that an illegal Guatemalan migrant who was previously deported is responsible for setting a woman on fire on the NYC subway. The woman was sleeping on the train when the man set her on fire and watched her burn. 

SOBERED UP The House Ethics Committee declined to investigate House Foreign Affairs Committee chairman Michael McCaul for public intoxication. McCaul was arrested in November at Dulles International Airport in Virginia and charged with a misdemeanor, which was dropped the next day. McCaul says he became disoriented after mixing the sleeping pill Ambien with alcohol. 

First out of the Gaetz 

The long-anticipated House Ethics report into former representative Matt Gaetz’s alleged sexual misconduct was released Monday. The committee initially voted not to release the report when Gaetz resigned from Congress amid Trump tapping him to serve as attorney general. But House Ethics changed its tune after Gaetz withdrew from consideration and moved on to a new job at One America News Network. 

The report provides evidence consistent with previous public reporting that Gaetz had Venmoed young, beautiful ladies for their company and sometimes threw them some extra dough just for being sweet. The most bombastic of the allegations are that Gaetz violated Florida’s statutory rape law by using drugs and sleeping with a seventeen-year-old girl. He is also accused of routinely used illegal drugs — cocaine, namely — including in his congressional office. Whomst among us? 

“The Committee determined there is substantial evidence that Representative Gaetz violated House Rules and other standards of conduct prohibiting prostitution, statutory rape, illicit drug use, impermissible gifts, special favors or privileges and obstruction of Congress,” the report reads.

Gaetz filed suit to prevent release of the report, arguing that since he is now a private citizen he is no longer under the jurisdiction of the House Ethics Committee. He also pushed back against the allegations that he paid women for sex, suggesting on X that he was just really nice to his girlfriends. 

“Giving funds to someone you are dating — that they didn’t ask for — and that isn’t ‘charged’ for sex is now prostitution?!?” Gaetz said incredulously. “There is a reason they did this to me in a Christmas Eve-Eve report and not in a courtroom of any kind where I could present evidence and challenge witnesses.”

He also pointed out that the FBI investigated him for allegations of sex trafficking and never charged him with a crime, closing the investigation last year. A GOP member of the House told Cockburn, “This report stuff concerns me. Why release it? If neither the DOJ nor state can prove any of the allegations, could releasing it be considered libel?”

–Cockburn

Biden commutes killers 

A group of savage mass murderers and cop killers is getting a welcome Christmas present, with President Joe Biden commuting the death penalties that thirty-seven of America’s worst criminals were facing down to life in prison.

The decision came amidst an already controversial and historic pardoning and clemency spree by Biden, which many view as a means to lessen the bipartisan outrage over the wide-ranging and preemptive pardon he gave his son Hunter.

Biden decided against dropping the death penalty of three of the highest-profile killers in America: the Boston Marathon bomber, the Tree of Life shooter, and the white supremacist who murdered parishioners at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church.

As part of an effort to “ensur[e] a fair and effective justice system,” Biden reduced sentences for some of the lucky prisoners, including a man who murdered a young girl just days after forcing her to watch him kill her grandmother, a child rapist who murdered two young girls after sexually assaulting them and a man who was convicted of murdering several immigrants he had kidnapped and forced to pay ransom.

Another sentence reduction is being called a slap in the face to law enforcement. Biden commuted the sentence of a cop-killer, prompting the Fraternal Order of Police Capital City Lodge #9 to call his move “an inexcusable affront to the memory of Officer Bryan Hurst and the law enforcement community as a whole.” Hurst’s widow said that Biden’s move “undermines the entire justice system, as [the murderer] was convicted and sentenced by a jury. There was never a question of guilt. He never denied what he did, and the entire trial was simply for his defense to plea for mercy.”

“It’s amazing that Biden and the Dems started with HR-1, which would have taken over gerrymandering, codified ballot harvesting and locked in their power for decades and ended by handing a victory to the 340 hardcore Ivy League-NGO-nonprofit activists who really really, really care about the death penalty,” a veteran GOP House staffer noted to The Spectator. 

–Matthew Foldi