President-elect Donald Trump confirmed Monday that he spoke with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu recently, and warned that “all hell is gonna break out” if Israelis held hostage by Hamas aren’t returned by January 20, the day he reenters the White House.
“We had a very good talk. We discussed what will happen.… As you know, I gave warning that if these hostages aren’t back home by that date, all hell’s gonna break out,” Trump said, doubling down on threats he made earlier this month.
Netanyahu on Sunday said he had a phone call with Trump over the weekend, during which the two spoke about Israel’s next steps in Gaza and Syria.
“It was a very friendly, very warm, and very important conversation,” the Israeli prime minister said in a video on Sunday. “We discussed the need to complete Israel’s victory, and we also spoke at length about the efforts we are making to free our hostages.
“We will continue to act relentlessly to return home all of our hostages, the living and the deceased,” he added.
Around 250 Israelis were abducted by Hamas during their attack on October 7, 2023. At least 154 have been released, rescued by the Israel Defense Forces, or recovered dead. In the last year, Israel has responded by killing more than 45,000 Palestinian adults, children, journalists, and aid workers in the Gaza Strip, doing irreversible damage to the region.
Donald Trump promised Monday to launch a lawsuit against The Des Moines Register over a preelection poll that found Vice President Kamala Harris had “leapfrogged” the Republican candidate, in a state he went on to handily win.
During a press conference at Mar-a-Lago, one journalist asked Trump about his ongoing defamation cases, asking, “Could you see moving that to other people with individual platforms, social media influencers, people that—”
“Or newspapers, yeah.” Trump interrupted.
“Yeah, oh, I do. I think you have to do it, because they’re very dishonest,” Trump continued. “We need a great media, we need a fair media. We need, uh, it’s very important. And we need borders, we need walls, but we need borders and we need fair elections.”
Trump went on rambling on about how they were still counting votes in California, which is not true. The weave eventually wove itself back, and the president-elect continued his pledge to sue newspapers over alleged defamation.
“I have a few others that I’m doing, uh, I’m gonna, as an example, we’re bringing—I’m doing this not because I want to, I’m doing this because I have an obligation to—I’m gonna be bringing one against the people in Iowa, their newspaper, which had a very, very good pollster, who got me right all the time. And then just before the election, she said I was gonna lose by three or four points, and it became the biggest story all over the world … because I was gonna win Iowa by 20 points. The farmers love me, and I love the farmers,” he said.
Trump was speaking about pollster Ann Selzer, whose Iowa poll anticipated that Harris would lead Trump by three points in the state. In reality, he won Iowa by 13 points, making for a 16-point error. Selzer & Co. had previously been considered the gold standard of polling in the country.
Crucially, it wasn’t the “biggest story” all over the world, but it’s one that has been bothering Trump for more than a month now. In a post on Truth Social last month, Trump called out Selzer by name and said that an investigation into her poll was “fully called for!”
As far off as Selzer’s poll was, it’s not illegal to publish a poll that doesn’t accurately predict something. Trump’s obsession with Selzer appears to be part of the president-elect’s penchant for targeting those who publish unflattering things about him.
Buried in Trump’s incoherent rambling Monday, he pledged to make good on that threat and claimed that Selzer’s poll constituted “fraud” and “election interference.” He promised to file “a major lawsuit against them, either today or tomorrow.”
Trump also mentioned his other ongoing media lawsuits against CBS News’s 60 Minutes, journalist and author Bob Woodward, and the Pulitzer Center for giving prizes to journalists who wrote about Russian interference in the 2016 election, which Trump falsely claims was a “hoax.”
Trump’s newest threat against the media comes on the heels of a $15 million settlement with ABC News in a defamation lawsuit he brought against the network—a settlement that has baffled media experts, who believe that ABC could have won the suit, and consider the network’s sudden surrender to be obedience in advance of Trump’s coming presidential term.
More than 43,000 Ukrainian soldiers have been killed since Russia invaded the Eastern European nation in February 2022. Cities have been leveled, and 370,000 injuries have been reported, according to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy.
But the scope and scale of that devastation is apparently easily comprehended by Donald Trump, who has refused to visit the country. Speaking with reporters at Mar-a-Lago on Monday, Trump repeated several times that Ukraine had been “flattened like a pancake” while comparing the war to his lucrative Manhattan real estate career.
The president-elect took a detour while responding to a question about whether he believed Ukraine should cede territory to Russia, describing areas of the country as more akin to “demolition sites” than recognizable cities.
“A lot of that territory, when you look at what’s happened to those—there are cities where there’s not a building standing. It’s a demolition site. There’s not a building standing,” Trump said. “People can’t go back to those cities.”
But that’s when the president-elect’s answer took a turn for the worse, suddenly conflating the controlled demolitions carried out by his multimillion-dollar real estate development company to the........