AP News in Brief at 6:04 a.m. EST
No surprise: Trump left many clues he wouldn't go quietly
WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump left plenty of clues he'd try to burn the place down on his way out the door.
The clues spread over a lifetime of refusing to acknowledge defeat. They spanned a presidency marked by raw, angry rhetoric, puffed-up conspiracy theories and a kind of fellowship with “patriots” drawn from the seething ranks of right-wing extremists. The clues piled on at light speed when Trump lost the election and wouldn't admit it.
The culmination of all that came Wednesday when Trump supporters, exhorted by the president to go to the Capitol and “fight like hell” against a “stolen” election, overran and occupied the building in an explosive confrontation that left a Capitol Police officer and four others dead.
The mob went there so emboldened by Trump's send-off at a rally that his partisans live-streamed themselves trashing the place. Trump, they figured, had their back.
This was, after all, the president who had responded to a right-wing plot to kidnap Michigan's Democratic governor last year with the comment: “Maybe it was a problem. Maybe it wasn't.”
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A farewell to @realDonaldTrump, gone after 57,000 tweets
WASHINGTON (AP) — @realDonaldTrump, the Twitter feed that grew from the random musings of a reality TV star into the cudgel of an American president, has died. It was not quite 12 years old.
The provocative handle was given birth by a New York real estate tycoon who used it to help him become the 45th U.S. president. It began with a May 4, 2009, tweet promoting Donald Trump's upcoming appearance on David Letterman's show.
It died more than 57,000 tweets later, with Trump using some of his final postings on the powerful platform to commiserate with a pro-Trump mob that besieged the halls of Congress in a deadly assault as lawmakers were set to certify his defeat.
The account met its demise when Twitter announced Friday it was pulling the plug permanently on @realDonaldTrump, citing concern that Trump would use it for “further incitement of violence.” Trump retorted that he'd be "building out our own platform in the near future. We will not be SILENCED!"
Trump, a novice politician but seasoned salesman, realized the power of social media in ways that few other politicians did. And he wielded it with never-before-seen power to diminish his opponents, shape elections and mold reality — at least in the eyes of his supporters.
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Deadly siege focuses attention on Capitol Police
WASHINGTON (AP) — The police were badly outnumbered.
Only a few dozen guarded the West front of the U.S. Capitol when they were rushed by thousands of pro-Trump demonstrators bent on breaking into the building.
Armed with metal pipes, pepper spray and other weapons, the mob pushed past the thin police line, and one protester hurled a fire extinguisher at a officer, according to video widely circulated on YouTube.
“They’re getting into the Capitol tonight! They’re getting in," the man filming shouts in delight.
They breached the line moments later, and rioters soon broke into the building, taking over the House and Senate chambers and running wild in Statuary Hall and other hallowed symbols of democracy. The mob ransacked the place, smashing windows and waving Trump, American and Confederate flags. The lawmakers who were voting to affirm President-elect Joe Biden's victory were forced into hiding for hours.
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Democrats plan lightning Trump impeachment, want him out now
WASHINGTON (AP) — Warnings flashing, Democrats in Congress laid plans for swift impeachment of President Donald Trump, demanding decisive, immediate action to ensure an “unhinged” commander in chief can't add to the damage they say he's inflicted or even ignite nuclear war in his final days in office.
As the country comes to terms with the violent siege of the U.S. Capitol by Trump supporters that left five dead, the crisis that appears to be among the final acts of his presidency is deepening like few other periods in the nation’s history. With less than two weeks until he's gone, Democrats want him out — now — and he has few defenders speaking up for him in his own Republican party.
“We must take action,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi declared Friday on a private conference call with Democrats.
And one prominent Republican, Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, told the Anchorage Daily News that Trump simply “needs to get out.”
The final days of Trump’s presidency are spinning toward a chaotic end as he holes up at the White House, abandoned by many aides, top Republicans and Cabinet members. After refusing to concede defeat in the November election, he has now promised a smooth transfer of power when Democratic President-elect Joe Biden is sworn in on Jan. 20. But even so, he says he will not attend the inauguration — the first such presidential snub since just after the Civil War.
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'He's on his own': Some Republicans begin to flee from Trump
NEW YORK (AP) — President Donald Trump's steadfast grip on Republicans in Washington is beginning to crumble, leaving him more politically isolated than at any other point in his turbulent administration.
After riling up a crowd that later staged a violent siege of the U.S. Capitol, Trump appears to have lost some of his strongest allies, including South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham. Two Cabinet members and at least a half dozen aides have resigned. A handful of congressional Republicans are openly considering whether to join a renewed push for impeachment.
One GOP senator who has split with Trump in the past called on him to resign and questioned whether she would stay in the party.
“I want him out,” Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska told The Anchorage Daily News. "He has caused enough damage.”
The insurrection on the heels of a bruising election loss in Georgia accomplished what other low points in Trump's presidency did not: force Republicans to fundamentally reassess their relationship with a leader who has long abandoned tradition and decorum. The result could reshape the party, threatening the influence that Trump craves while creating a divide between those in Washington and activists in swaths of the country where the president is especially popular.
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French vaccine rollout slowed by focus on elderly, red tape
PARIS (AP) — The few hours it took to give the first coronavirus vaccine shots to 14 residents of the John XXIII nursing home — named after a pope and not far from the birthplace in eastern France of vaccine pioneer Louis Pasteur — took weeks of preparation.
The home's director, Samuel Robbe, first had to chew his way through a dense 61-page vaccination protocol, one of several hefty guides from the French government that exhaustively detail how to proceed, down to the number of times (10) that each flask of vaccine should be turned upside down to mix its contents.
“Delicately,” the booklet stipulates. “Do not shake."
As France tries to figure out why its vaccination campaign launched so slowly, the answer lies partly in forests of red tape and the decision to prioritize vulnerable older people in nursing homes. They are perhaps the toughest group to start with, because of the need for informed consent and difficulties explaining the complex science of fast-tracked vaccines.
Claude Fouet, still full of vim and good humor at age 89 but with memory problems, was among the first in his Paris care home to agree to a vaccination. But in conversation, it quickly becomes apparent that his understanding of the pandemic is spotty. Eve Guillaume, the home's director, had to remind Fouet that in April he survived his own brush with the virus that has killed more than 66,000 people in France.
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Biden calls Trump 'unfit' but doesn't endorse impeachment
WILMINGTON, Del. (AP) — President-elect Joe Biden says that President Donald Trump isn't “fit for the job,” but he repeatedly refused to endorse growing Democratic calls to impeach him a second time.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said in a letter to members of her chamber that lawmakers could move as early as next week to impeach Trump for inciting a violent mob that overran the U.S. Capitol if the president didn't “immediately" resign. Pelosi and Democratic Senate leader Chuck Schumer also have called on Vice President Mike Pence and the Cabinet to invoke the 25th Amendment to force Trump from office — a process for stripping the president of his post and installing the vice president to take over.
Addressing reporters in his home state of Delaware after an event Friday introducing some of his Cabinet choices, Biden noted that a key reason he ran for president was because he'd “thought for a long, long time that President Trump wasn’t fit for the job."
“I’ve been saying for now, well, over a year, he’s not fit to serve,” Biden said. “He’s one of the most incompetent presidents in the history of the United States of America.”
But he refused to back efforts to remove Trump from the White House and insisted that impeachment was up to Congress. Instead, Biden said he was focused on the start of his own administration on Jan. 20, and he said his top three priorities are beating back the coronavirus, distributing vaccines fairly and equitably and reviving the struggling economy.
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Virus collides with politics as German election year starts
BERLIN (AP) — The coronavirus pandemic is colliding with politics as Germany embarks on its vaccination drive and one of the most unpredictable election years in the country's post-World War II history.
After months of relatively harmonious pandemic management, fingers are being pointed as the center-left junior partner in Chancellor Angela Merkel's coalition government takes aim at what it says has been a chaotic start to vaccinating the population.
The discord is likely a sign of the times to come. An electoral marathon in Germany starts in mid-March, when two of six state elections scheduled this year will be held, and culminates on Sept. 26, when voters choose a new national parliament. Germany's choices will help set the tone for Europe in the coming years.
Merkel, who has led Germany since 2005, plans to step down at the September election. It's the first election since post-war West Germany's inaugural vote in 1949 in which there is no incumbent chancellor seeking another term.
Surveys have shown high approval ratings for the 66-year-old Merkel during the pandemic. She has taken a science-led, safety-first approach that has helped her center-right party into a strong poll lead, although Germany has struggled since the fall to get the coronavirus under control.
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Family: Trump supporter who died followed QAnon conspiracy
KENNESAW, Ga. (AP) — Before she died in Wednesday’s siege at the U.S. Capitol, Rosanne Boyland was a recovering drug addict who wanted to become a sobriety counselor. But she also believed, wrongly, that President Donald Trump won the November election, and she'd begun following a dark conspiracy theory that has circulated online, her family said.
“It just spiraled,” her sister, Lonna Cave, said Friday outside her home in suburban Atlanta.
Boyland, 34, was one of three people who died of medical emergencies when a pro-Trump mob, egged on by the president, stormed the Capitol as Congress was certifying President-elect Joe Biden’s victory. A fourth person was fatally shot by police and an officer was also killed.
Capitol police have not released details about how Boyland, a Kennesaw resident, died.
Cave said the family has heard conflicting accounts. A friend who was with her said Boyland was pinned to the ground and trampled during a violent clash between rioters and police. But her sister said a police detective told the family Boyland had collapsed while standing off to the side in the Capitol Rotunda.
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N. Korea threatens to build more nukes, cites US hostility
SEOUL, South Korea (AP) — North Korean leader Kim Jong Un threatened to expand his nuclear arsenal as he disclosed a list of high-tech weapons systems under development, saying the fate of relations with the United States depends on whether it abandons its hostile policy, state media reported Saturday.
Kim’s comments during a key meeting of the ruling party this week were seen as applying pressure on the incoming administration of President-elect Joe Biden, who has called Kim a “thug” and has criticized his summits with President Donald Trump.
The Korean Central News Agency quoted Kim as saying the “key to establishing new relations between (North Korea) and the United States is whether the United States withdraws its hostile policy.”
Kim said he won’t use his nuclear weapons first unless threatened. He also suggested he is open to dialogue if Washington is too, but stressed North Korea must further strengthen its military and nuclear capability to cope with intensifying U.S. hostility.
He again called the U.S. his country’s “main enemy.”