Trump makes last-ditch plea for RFK Jr.’s confirmation: Live updates

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Vice President JD Vance will leave for his first foreign trip in office next week.

The vice president plans to travel to France and Germany, even before Trump travels overseas.

The vice president plans to attend the AI Action Summit in Paris and the Munich Security Conference.

Vance has already made two domestic trips as vice president, one to Damascus, Virginia to view the government’s hurricane response and one to East Palestine, Ohio to view the response to the toxic chemical train crash.

By Katelyn Caralle, Senior U.S. Political REporter

USAID’s Washington, D.C. headquarters remain closed to workers on Tuesday.

The U.S. Agency for International Development was shuttered overnight from Sunday to Monday as Elon Musk and President Donald Trump agreed to close up shop.

Employees received an email that the agency offices were closed on Monday, February 3 and were told to not come in for work.

Hundreds of other workers were locked out of the system when they woke up on Monday.

A USAID source told Fox News the offices are still closed.

‘Extended from headquarters to all buildings per message to staff last night,’ they noted.

Press secretary Karoline Leavitt said Monday that President Donald Trump remained ‘wholeheartedly committed’ to bringing down food prices despite his current set of tariff threats.

Leavitt appeared on Fox News and also talked with reporters outside the White House as Trump spoke with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau by phone Monday afternoon.

Ahead of taking office Trump pledged to impose 25 percent tariffs on U.S. allies and neighbors, Canada and Mexico, for not doing more to help patrol the borders.

Jon Michael Raasch, Political Reporter for DailyMail.com

Trump’s selection for attorney general, Pam Bondi, could have her Senate confirmation vote in the wee hours of Wednesday morning.

Senators voted 52 – 46 to end the debate on the former Florida AG and send her nomination to the floor for a full vote.

The soonest this vote could happen would be Wednesday around 1 am ET.

However, the lawmakers could strike a deal to vote on Bondi’s confirmation sooner or just come in and take the vote on Thursday morning.

By Emily Goodin, senior White House correspondent

President Donald Trump will welcome Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to the White House Tuesday for his first in-person meeting with a foreign leader since returning to the Oval Office.

The two men are expected to talk about the second phase of the ceasefire with Hamas, a possible nuclear threat from Iran, and a potential deal to normalize relations with Saudi Arabia.

Trump seems hesitant about the fragile peace in the Middle East.

‘I have no guarantees that the peace is going to hold,’ he told reporters on Monday.

The president and Netanyahu will hold an Oval Office meeting and a press conference as part of the Israeli leader’s visit.

The leaders developed a close relationship in Trump’s first term, in contrast to Netanyahu’s cooler one with Joe Biden. The Israeli prime minister is expected to receive a warm welcome when he arrives in the afternoon.

And that could help him back home where his approval rating is on the downslide as he deals with an on going corruption trial. Trump, however, remains very popular in Israel and that could prove a boost to Netanyahu.

On Inauguration Day, President Donald Trump celebrated his newly minted Vice President JD Vance, a former Marine, with members of the Armed Forces at the Commander in Chief ball.

‘They used to say bad things about [Vance]. Now, all of a sudden, he’s very well respected,’ Trump commented.

Both Trump and Vance had been ridiculed as ‘weird’ by Democrats during the campaign, but now they were grinning on stage wearing tuxedos and wielding sabers to cut into a massive cake. Their wives Usha and Melania stood and watched and warfighters in the audience roared with approval.

The pair saluted the crowd with their swords as President Trump did the Trump dance and Vance used his arms to spell out the letters Y-M-C-A to his running mate’s theme song.

For Trump and Vance it was a crowning moment of their political journey, but it also marked the beginning of a unique relationship between the president and vice president as they take office.

President Donald Trump‘s FBI nominee Kash Patel had a flurry of close friends and family gathered in the front row of his Senate confirmation hearing last week.

Among those guests included Alina Habba, Special Presidential Envoy for Special Missions Ric Grenell, Patel’s parents who traveled all the way from India for the hearing, and his sister.

Patel, 44, met Wilkins, 26, at a conservative ReAwaken America event in October 2022, an insider told DailyMail.com. They started dating just a few months later in January 2023.

This came to the dismay of MAGA internet users as online searches about whether Patel was single spiked during his confirmation hearing on Thursday.

While Patel has never been married, he has been with Wilkins for over two years now and are serious about continuing their relationship.

The pair is making the move to Washington, D.C., together, DailyMail.com can exclusively reveal.

China has retaliated against President Donald Trump‘s tariffs by implementing some of its own, renewing a trade war between the world’s top two economies.

The measures, announced by China’s Finance Ministry, levy a 15 per cent duty on certain types of coal and liquefied natural gas and a 10 per cent tariff on crude oil, agricultural machinery, large-displacement cars and pickup trucks.

The country has separately imposed export controls on several elements critical to the production of modern high-tech products.

Many of the impacted minerals are essential to US economic or national security and have supply chains vulnerable to disruption.

Sarah Ewall-Wice, Senior U.S. Political Reporter:

The Senate Finance Committee is set to vote on the nomination of Robert Kennedy Jr. for Secretary of Health and Human Services on Tuesday.

If he is successfully voted out of the committee, it will head ot the Senate floor, but it is unclear whether he has the votes.

Some Republicans including Senator Bill Cassidy (R-LA) were ‘struggling’ with his nomination and raised concerns about this past work against vaccinations and basic understanding of Medicare and Medicaid at what were brutal confirmation hearings last week.

The Senate Intelligence Committee is also expected to hold a vote on Tuesday on the nomination of Tulsi Gabbard to serve as Director of National Intelligence, a source confirmed.

Some GOP senators expressed reservations after Gabbard refused to call Edward Snowden a ‘traitor’ at her confirmation hearing last week.