Election 2024 live: Trump appoints Tom Homan as border czar to oversee deportations and mocks Harris over Cheney support

There are desperate scenes on Democrat social media just now, where former Kamala Harris aide Jamal Simmons has urged Joe Biden to step down early to allow the Vice President to serve as interim president.

That prompted CNN pundit Bakari Sellers to respond by suggesting that Sonia Sotomayor should retire from the US Supreme Court to allow Harris to serve in her stead, a step the justice, 70, has expressed no interest in taking, according to The Wall Street Journal, despite the risk of her being succeeded by yet another Trump-appointed conservative if she does not.

Tony Hinchcliffe, the stand-up comic who joked that Puerto Rico was “a floating island of garbage” at one of the president-elect’s final rallies, has quietly returned to social media to repost the following two stories on X pointing to Latino support for the Republican on Election Day, seemingly a riposte to liberal commentators who had warned his crack could cost the 45th president a return to the White House.

Donald Trump has called on the Republican senators vying to be the next majority leader of the upper chamber of Congress in place of the outgoing Mitch McConnell to permit him to appoint temporary cabinet members without Senate approval via recess appointments, demanding they reject any judicial nominations until he takes office.

Complaining that Senate approval takes too long in a Truth Social post on Sunday, Trump said anyone seeking the leadership position “must agree to Recess Appointments (in the Senate!)”, a tactic that would effectively allow him to place any person in his cabinet without formal approval.

“Sometimes the votes can take two years, or more. This is what they did four years ago, and we cannot let it happen again. We need positions filled IMMEDIATELY!” the president-elect wrote.

Hours after Trump’s statement, three senators running for the leadership position endorsed Trump’s idea.

Texas Senator John Cornyn agreed Trump has the power to do so and urged his colleagues to get Trump’s cabinet chosen quickly.

South Dakota Senator John Thune said recess appointments were an option “on the table” and Florida Senator Rick Scott said he backed Trump “100 percent”.

Donald Trump will meet with President Joe Biden in the Oval Office this week, according to the White House.

The meeting, in which the two men are expected to discuss the transition of power in January, will be the president-elect’s first return to the White House since 2021 when he left office days after the January 6 Capitol riot and refused to attend Biden’s inauguration.

The awkward meeting is scheduled to take place at 11am on Wednesday, according to press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre, who said Biden extended the invitation to his predecessor and soon-to-be successor.

Despite the acrimony of the 2024 presidential race, Biden has promised a “peaceful transfer of power” on January 20 2025 – the date of Trump’s second inauguration.

Biden has said he will attend that ceremony, even though Trump did not return the favor in 2021.

Donald Trump reportedly advised Russian President Vladimir Putin not to escalate the war in Ukraine in a phone call the day after the presidential election, a new report says.

As one of his first orders of unofficial business as the president-elect, Trump spoke with Putin on Thursday in a telephone conversation that he took from his home in Florida, according to The Washington Post.

He allegedly asked the Kremlin leader not to escalate his war and reminded him of America’s military presence in Europe.

It was one of several calls Trump took with other leaders from around the world in the hours after he won the 2024 presidential election.

He also spoke with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.

Here’s more from Ariana Baio.

The New York Congresswoman, one of the president-elect’s most loyal and outspoken supporters on Capitol Hill, has reportedly been offered a role once held by Nikki Haley in the new administration, according to Kaitlan Collins of CNN.

Stefanik is currently the House Republican Conference chair (having replaced the aforementioned Cheney in that role in 2021) and is therefore the fourth highest-ranking member of the GOP.

She was the youngest woman ever elected to Congress when she entered its halls in 2014 and was initially a Trump critic in the Paul Ryan era, only to then make

a name for herself by aggressively challenging witnesses at Trump’s first impeachment hearings in 2019 and then embracing his false 2020 election fraud narrative.

In another post on Truth Social, Trump derided his defeated election rival Kamala Harris for campaigning with disaffected Republican Liz Cheney, calling the tactic “a BIG mistake” that had only served to angere conservatives and left Democrats “just plain scratching their heads in amazement”.

Donald Trump has announced that Tom Homan, the former acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), will serve in his incoming administration as border czar and take responsibility for the mass deportation of illegal immigrants he promised on the campaign trail.

The president-elect wrote on his Truth Social platform overnight that Homan would be in charge of “the Southern Border, the Northern Border, all Maritime, and Aviation Security”.

He added: “I’ve known Tom for a long time, and there is nobody better at policing and controlling our Borders.

“Likewise, Tom Homan will be in charge of all Deportation of Illegal Aliens back to their Country of Origin.

“Congratulations to Tom. I have no doubt he will do a fantastic, and long awaited for, job.”

If you’re not familiar with Homan, here’s a taster.

The ex-ICE director was involved in the Heritage Foundation’s notorious Project 2025 proposal for Trump’s second term and told the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee in July that he had “a message for the millions of illegal aliens who Joe Biden allowed to enter the country in violation of federal law – start packing, because you’re going home.”

At a panel on immigration policy that same month, Homan said: “Trump comes back in January, I’ll be on his heels coming back, and I will run the biggest deportation force this country has ever seen.”

And, last Thursday, he told Fox News he had “not politicked or asked… for a cabinet position” and that no offer had been made but added: “President Trump knows if he needs help securing that border I’m standing by.

“If he needs help running a deportation operation, I am standing by.”

Here’s more from Rhian Lubin and Josh Marcus.

Bernie Sanders has doubled down on his scathing remarks about the Democratic party having “abandoned” working-class voters, despite criticism from longtime friend and ally Nancy Pelosi.

The veteran Vermont senator reiterated that the US working class is “angry” but rejected the idea that the issue this election cycle had been with party “messaging.”

In a statement after Donald Trump sailed to victory over Kamala Harris, Sanders wrote that “it should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party, which has abandoned working-class people, would find that the working-class has abandoned them.”

The former House speaker and Democratic powerhouse Nancy Pelosi then slammed his remarks, saying she did not agree or “respect” them.

Speaking to MSNBC’s Meet The Press about Pelosi’s remarks, he said: “Nancy is a friend of mine, and we’ve worked together on many issues, but here is the reality, I have to say to Nancy, in the Senate, in the last two years, we have not even brought forth legislation to raise the minimum wage to a living wage, despite the fact that some 20 million people in this country are working for less than $15 an hour.