Trump says he supports polio vaccine despite signs of RFK Jr’s opposition – live | US politics

At his just-concluded press conference in Mar-a-Lago, Donald Trump was asked if he would consider pardoning New York mayor Eric Adams, who is facing corruption charges.

“Yeah, I think that he was treated pretty unfairly,” Trump replied.

Adams has been indicted on five federal charges related to accepting gifts in exchange for favors such as helping Turkey open a new diplomatic tower in Manhattan despite concerns about its fire safety system.

Last week, the New York Times reported that a lawyer who had filed petitions seeking to revoke the approval of vaccines for polio and other preventable diseases has been by Robert F Kennedy Jr’s side in interviews to hire top officials for the health and human services department.

A reporter asked Donald Trump today if he supported taking the polio vaccine out of circulation.

“You’re not going to lose the polio vaccine. That’s not going to happen,” Trump said. “I saw what happened with the polio, I have friends that were very much affected by that. I have friends from many years ago, and … they’re still in not such good shape because of it.”

The polio vaccine has been credited with suppressing, almost entirely, a disease that can cause lifelong paralysis in people who get it. Mitch McConnell, the top Senate Republican who survived the disease, condemned the news that Trump’s incoming administration could be hostile to the much-used vaccine.

However, Trump did signal some skepticism to the vaccine mandates enacted by some states and school districts. “I don’t like mandates. I’m not a big mandate person,” Trump said.

He also said that there might be a link between vaccines and pesticides and autism. “You take a look at autism today versus 20, 25 years ago, it’s like, not even believable. So we’re going to have reports,” Trump said.

But he downplayed fears that Kennedy, if confirmed to lead the nation’s health department, would make radical changes. “Nothing’s going to happen very quickly. I think you’re going to find that Bobby is much is a very rational guy,” Trump said.

At his ongoing press conference, Donald Trump was asked what he would say to people concerned about the anti-vaccine views of Robert F Kennedy Jr, who he nominated to lead the department of health and human services.

“I think he’s going to be much less radical than you would think. I think he’s got a very open mind, or I wouldn’t have put him there. He’s going to be very much less radical,” Trump said, adding “there are problems we don’t do as well as a lot of other nations … and we’re going to find out what those problems are.”

He didn’t specify what those problems were, but did promise to lower prescription drug costs by eliminating “middlemen”.

“We’re paying much more than other countries, and we have laws that make it impossible to reduce and we have a thing called the middleman. You know the middleman, right? The horrible middleman that makes more money, frankly, than the drug companies, and they don’t do anything except they’re a middleman. We’re going to knock out the middleman. I’m going to be very unpopular after that statement,” Trump said.

Donald Trump is expected to at 11am speak to reporters from his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida.

The president-elect has spoken publicly only occasionally in the weeks since he won re-election to the White House, instead making his views known through posts on Truth Social, or statements from his transition team.

Trump did not say what he will be talking about, but we will let you know when we find out.

Republican senator Lindsey Graham says Pete Hegseth, the former Fox News host who Donald Trump nominated to lead the defense department, told him that he has allowed a woman who accused him of sexual assault to speak publicly.

While police brought no charges over the alleged assault, Hegseth reportedly paid the accuser a settlement, in exchange for her signing a nondisclosure agreement about the allegation. In a Sunday interview with NBC News, Graham said that Hegseth “told me he would release her from that agreement”.

Graham, who had expressed some concerns about Hegseth as the sexual assault allegations and reports of other bad behavior came to light, otherwise spoke positively about the defense secretary nominee:

I’m in a good place with Pete unless something I don’t know about comes out. These allegations are disturbing, but they’re anonymous. I asked him point blank, were you drunk in a bar and got up and said, let’s kill all the Muslims. He said, no. There’s one allegation on a police report about sexual assault, that person has the right to come forward to the committee. But about mismanagement of money, about, you know, having a drinking problem and saying inappropriate things, all of these are anonymous allegations.

He’s given me his side of the story. It makes sense to me, I believe him. Unless somebody’s willing to come forward, I think he’s going to get through.

In addition to the more than 120 Democratic lawmakers who sent Joe Biden a letter this weekend urging him to have the Equal Rights Amendment added to the constitution, New York senator Kirsten Gillibrand is on a personal quest to get the president on board.

The New York Times reports that the Democrat has made the case to whoever will listen to her that the ERA has met the threshold for ratification, and the president should order it published. From Gillibrand’s interview with the Times:

Ms. Gillibrand has pleaded her E.R.A. case at every available opportunity. The third-term New Yorker has met with Jeffrey D. Zients, the White House chief of staff, and Anita Dunn, a former top adviser to Mr. Biden. Her request is for a five-minute meeting with Mr. Biden himself. She has used passing 30-second interactions in photo lines to personally pitch the president, so far to no avail.

Ms. Gillibrand has presented White House officials with fat binders full of legal research and polling, which have on the cover a printout of Mr. Biden posing as if he is on a Taylor Swift Eras Tour poster. (E.R.A. — get it?)

Ms. Gillibrand sat down with Minyon Moore, one of Vice President Kamala Harris’s top advisers and confidantes, to persuade Ms. Harris to champion the E.R.A. and asked her to speak to other White House officials about it. Still, nothing happened.

Undeterred, Ms. Gillibrand has continued to text and harangue and flatter, all in service of procuring a brief meeting with Mr. Biden to make a more comprehensive pitch.

“I’ve never done more legal analysis and work since I was a lawyer,” Ms. Gillibrand said. So far, she has been strung along.

“It’s ‘I’ll get back to you; I’ll get back to you.’ Everyone always says, ‘We love your arguments.’ I never know what the ‘but’ is.”

Kelly Scully, a White House spokeswoman, said senior administration officials had been discussing the proposal with lawmakers and other stakeholders.

“President Biden has been clear that he wants to see the Equal Rights Amendment definitively enshrined in the Constitution,” Ms. Scully said in a statement. “It is long past time that we recognize the clear will of the American people.”

Good morning, US politics blog readers. Dozens of Democratic lawmakers have proposed a novel idea for Joe Biden to secure his presidential legacy in his final weeks in office: decide that the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), which protects against sex discrimination, has met the standard for ratification, and have the Archivist of the United States publish the amendment into the constitution. The proposal was approved by the US House and Senate in the early 1970s but a conservative backlash prevented it from being ratified by the necessary two-thirds of states by a 1982 deadline congress had set.

In the years since, several states have voted to approve the amendment, and in a letter to Biden sent over the weekend, more than 120 House Democrats argued that the ERA has met the requirements, and should be added to the constitution as the 28th amendment, and the first since 1992. The subtext here is Donald Trump’s impending arrival in the White House, and the likelihood that Biden publishing the ERA would trigger a court fight that casts a shadow over the newly arrived president, particularly since he is viewed as politically vulnerable among women. We’ll tell you more about the ERA push today.

Here’s what else is going on:

• Robert F Kennedy Jr, the anti-vaccine activist Trump has named to lead the health and human services department, is heading to Capitol Hill to meet with Republican senators throughout the day.

• Biden will at 12.15pm hold an event at the labor department to promote his administration’s efforts to help American workers, then convene a Hanukkah reception at 7.45pm.

• Syrian diplomats and community leaders plan to today hoist the flag of “Free Syria” at its Washington DC embassy, which has been closed since 2014.