Politics

WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. (AP) — Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau flew to Florida on Friday to have dinner with President-elect Donald Trump at his Mar-a-Lago club after Trump threatened to impose sweeping tariffs on Canadian products.

Trump threatened to impose tariffs on products from Canada and Mexico if they don’t stop what he called the flow of drugs and migrants across their borders. He said he would impose a 25% tax on all products entering the U.S. from Canada and Mexico as one of his first executive orders.

A person familiar with the details called it a “positive wide-ranging dinner that lasted three hours.” The official, who was not authorized to speak publicly and spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity, said topics included trade, border security, fentanyl, defense, Ukraine, NATO, China and pipelines, as well as the the Group of Seven meeting in Canada next year.

Although Trump once called Trudeau “weak” and “dishonest” during his first term, ties between the two countries have remained among the closest in the world. Trudeau is the first leader from the G7 countries to visit Trump since the Nov. 5 election.

Joining Trump and Trudeau at dinner were Howard Lutnick, Trump’s nominee for commerce secretary, North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum, Trump’s pick to lead the Interior Department, Mike Waltz, Trump’s choice to be his national security adviser, and the three men’s wives.

Also at the dinner were David McCormick, just elected U.S. senator from Pennsylvania, and his wife, Dina Powell, a former deputy national security adviser under Trump, as well as Canadian Public Safety Minister Dominic LeBlanc, whose responsibilities include border security, and Katie Telford, Trudeau’s chief of staff.

McCormick posted a photo on X of the group seated at a round table on the patio of Mar-a-Lago. At the table behind the president-elect a boy can be seen mugging for the camera.

Trump’s transition did not respond to questions about what they had discussed or whether the conversation alleviated Trump’s concerns about the border.

A smiling Trudeau declined comment upon returning to his West Palm Beach hotel late Friday.

Trudeau said earlier Friday that he would resolve the tariffs issue by talking to Trump. Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum said Thursday after speaking with Trump that she is confident a tariff war with the United States will be averted.

“We’re going to work together to meet some of the concerns,” Trudeau told reporters in Prince Edward Island in Atlantic Canada. “But ultimately it is through lots of real constructive conversations with President Trump that I am going to have, that will keep us moving forward on the right track for all Canadians.”

Trudeau said Trump got elected because he promised to bring down the cost of groceries but now he’s talking about adding 25% to the cost of all kinds of products including potatoes from Prince Edward Island.

“It is important to understand that Donald Trump, when he makes statements like that, he plans on carrying them out. There’s no question about it,” Trudeau said.

“We can work together as we did previously,” Trudeau said.

Trump made the tariff threat Monday while railing against an influx of illegal migrants, even though the numbers at the Canadian border pale in comparison to the southern border.

The U.S. Border Patrol made 56,530 arrests at the Mexican border in October alone — and 23,721 arrests at the Canadian one between October 2023 and September 2024.

Trump also railed about fentanyl from Mexico and Canada, even though seizures from the Canadian border are few in comparison to the Mexican border. U.S. customs agents seized 43 pounds of fentanyl at the Canadian border last fiscal year, compared with 21,100 pounds at the Mexican border.

Canadian officials say lumping Canada in with Mexico is unfair but say they are ready to make new investments in border security.

Trudeau called Trump after he made his social media posts on the border.

A government official said Canada is preparing for every eventuality and has started thinking about what items to target with tariffs in retaliation. The official stressed no decision has been made. The person spoke on condition of anonymity as they were not authorized to speak publicly.

Canada is the top export destination for 36 U.S. states. Nearly $3.6 billion Canadian (US$2.7 billion) worth of goods and services cross the border each day.

About 60% of U.S. crude oil imports are from Canada, and 85% of U.S. electricity imports are from Canada.

Canada is also the largest foreign supplier of steel, aluminum and uranium to the U.S. and has 34 critical minerals and metals that the Pentagon is eager for and investing in for national security.

Canada is one of the most trade-dependent countries in the world, and 77% of Canada’s exports go to the U.S.

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BUCHAREST (Reuters) – Robert F. Kennedy Jr., President-elect Donald Trump’s choice to head the U.S. health department, will be in Romania next week to meet Calin Georgescu, the surprise far-right winner in the first round of a presidential election, a Romanian television station said.

Georgescu finished first in last Sunday’s vote, and secured a place in a run-off scheduled for Dec. 8, in a win that could upend politics in Romania and undermine its pro-Western stance.

However, the election result has been challenged at Romania’s top court, which ordered a recount of all the votes cast last Sunday. The court will decide on Monday whether to annul the first round. Romania also holds a parliamentary election on Sunday.

Kennedy will be in Bucharest next week to launch his book on the coronavirus pandemic, with a preface written by Georgescu, private television station Realitatea said in a statement. Kennedy is an environmentalist who has spread misinformation about vaccines.

“Realitatea is a media partner of the year-end meeting between the future Health Secretary in Donald Trump’s government and the surprise winner of the presidential vote,” Realitatea said in a statement. It added the televised discussion will take place on Dec. 5.

A spokesperson for Kennedy, and representatives of Republican Trump’s transition team, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Georgescu told Realitatea earlier this week that Kennedy might come to Bucharest.

On Saturday, his communications team neither denied nor confirmed the meeting.

(Reporting by Luiza Ilie; Additional reporting by Tim Reid in West Palm Beach, Florida.; Editing by Frances Kerry)

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WASHINGTON (AP) — President-elect Donald Trump has nominated Kash Patel to serve as FBI director, turning to a fierce ally to bring change to America’s premier law enforcement agency. It’s the latest bombshell Trump has thrown at the Washington establishment and a test for how far Senate Republicans will go in confirming his nominees.

“I am proud to announce that Kashyap ‘Kash’ Patel will serve as the next Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation,” Trump posted Saturday night on Truth Social. “Kash is a brilliant lawyer, investigator, and ‘America First’ fighter who has spent his career exposing corruption, defending Justice, and protecting the American People.”

The selection is in keeping with Trump’s view that the government’s law enforcement and intelligence agencies require a radical transformation. It shows how Trump is trying prevent the questionable  federal investigations that shadowed his first administration and later led to his indictment

Patel “played a pivotal role in uncovering the Russia, Russia, Russia Hoax, standing as an advocate for truth, accountability, and the Constitution,” Trump wrote Saturday night.

Patel would replace Christopher Wray, who was appointed by Trump in 2017 but quickly fell out of favor with the president and his allies. Though the position carries a 10-year term, Wray’s removal was not unexpected given Trump’s long-running public criticism of him and the FBI, including after a search of his Florida’s property for classified documents and two investigations that resulted in his indictment.

Patel’s past proposals, if carried out, would lead to convulsive change for the agency.

He’s called for dramatically reducing the FBI’s footprint, a perspective that dramatically sets him apart from earlier directors who have sought additional resources for the bureau, and has suggested closing down the bureau’s headquarters in Washington and “reopen it the next day as a museum of the deep state” — Trump’s pejorative catch-all for the federal bureaucracy.

And though the Justice Department in 2021 claimed it halted the practice of secretly seizing reporters’ phone records during leak investigation, Patel has said he intends to aggressively hunt down government officials who leak information to reporters and change the law to make it easier to sue journalists.

During an interview with Steve Bannon last December, Patel said he and others “will go out and find the conspirators not just in government but in the media.”

“We’re going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections,” Patel said, referring to the 2020 presidential election in which Biden, the Democratic challenger, defeated Trump. “We’re going to come after you, whether it’s criminally or civilly. We’ll figure that out. But yeah, we’re putting you all on notice.”

Trump also announced Saturday that he would nominate Sheriff Chad Chronister, the top law enforcement officer in Hillsborough County, Florida, to serve as the administrator of the Drug Enforcement Agency.

Chronister is another Florida Republican named to Trump’s administration. He has worked for the Hillsborough County Sheriff’s Office since 1992 and became the top law enforcement officer in Hillsborough County 2017. He also worked closely with Trump’s choice for attorney general, Pam Bondi.

Patel, the child of Indian immigrants and a former public defender, spent several years as a Justice Department prosecutor before catching the Trump administration’s attention as a staffer for the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.

The panel’s then-chairman, Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif., was a strong Trump ally who tasked Patel with running the committee’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 campaign. Patel ultimately helped author what became known as the “Nunes Memo,” a four-page report that detailed how it said the Justice Department had erred in obtaining a warrant to surveil a former Trump campaign volunteer. The memo’s release faced vehement opposition from Wray and the Justice Department, who warned that it would be reckless to disclose sensitive information.

A subsequent inspector general report identified significant problems with FBI surveillance during the Russia investigation, but also found no evidence that the FBI had acted with partisan motives in conducting the probe.

The Russia investigation fueled Patel’s suspicions of the FBI, the intelligence community and also the media, which he has called “the most powerful enemy the United States has ever seen.” Seizing on compliance errors in the FBI’s use of a spy program that officials say is vital for national security, Patel has accused the FBI of having “weaponized” its surveillance powers against innocent Americans.

Patel parlayed that work into influential administration roles on the National Security Council and later as chief of staff to acting Defense Secretary Christopher Miller.

He continued as a loyal Trump lieutenant even after he left office, accompanying the president-elect into court during his criminal trial in New York and asserting to reporters that Trump was the victim of a “constitutional circus.”

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WASHINGTON (AP) — A tax break for millionaires, and almost everyone else.

An end to the COVID-19-era government subsidies that some Americans have used to purchase health insurance.

Limits to food stamps, including for women and children, and other safety net programs. Rollbacks to Biden-era green energy programs. Mass deportations. Government job cuts to “drain the swamp.”

Having won the election and sweeping to power, Republicans are planning an ambitious 100-day agenda with President-elect Donald Trump in the White House and GOP lawmakers in a congressional majority to accomplish their policy goals.

Atop the list is the plan to renew some $4 trillion in expiring GOP tax cuts, a signature domestic achievement of Trump’s first term and an issue that may define his return to the White House.

“What we’re focused on right now is being ready, Day 1,” said House Majority Leader Steve Scalise, R-La., after meeting recently with GOP colleagues to map out the road ahead.

The policies emerging will revive long-running debates about America’s priorities, its gaping income inequities and the proper size and scope of its government, especially in the face of mounting federal deficits now approaching $2 trillion a year.

The discussions will test whether Trump and his Republican allies can achieve the kinds of real-world outcomes wanted, needed or supported when voters gave the party control of Congress and the White House.

“The past is really prologue here,” said Lindsay Owens, executive director of the Groundwork Collaborative, recalling the 2017 tax debate.

Trump’s first term became defined by those tax cuts, which were approved by Republicans in Congress and signed into law only after their initial campaign promise to “repeal and replace” Democratic President Barack Obama’s health care law sputtered, failing with the famous thumbs-down vote by then-Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz.

The GOP majority in Congress quickly pivoted to tax cuts, assembling and approving the multitrillion-dollar package by year’s end.

In the time since Trump signed those cuts into law, the big benefits have accrued to higher-income households. The top 1 percent — those making nearly $1 million and above — received about a $60,000 income tax cut, while those with lower incomes got as little as a few hundred dollars, according to the Tax Policy Center and other groups. Some people ended up paying about the same.

“The big economic story in the U.S. is soaring income inequality,” said Owens. “And that is actually, interestingly, a tax story.”

In preparation for Trump’s return, Republicans in Congress have been meeting privately for months and with the president-elect to go over proposals to extend and enhance those tax breaks, some of which would otherwise expire in 2025.

That means keeping in place various tax brackets and a standardized deduction for individual earners, along with the existing rates for so-called pass-through entities such as law firms, doctors’ offices or businesses that take their earnings as individual income.

Typically, the price tag for the tax cuts would be prohibitive. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that keeping the expiring provisions in place would add some $4 trillion to deficits over a decade.

Adding to that, Trump wants to include his own priorities in the tax package, including lowering the corporate rate, now at 21% from the 2017 law, to 15%, and doing away with individual taxes on tips and overtime pay.

But Avik Roy, president of the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity, said blaming the tax cuts for the nation’s income inequality is “just nonsense” because tax filers up and down the income ladder benefited. He instead points to other factors, including the Federal Reserve’s historically low interest rates that enable borrowing, including for the wealthy, on the cheap.

“Americans don’t care if Elon Musk is rich,” Roy said. “What they care about is, what are you doing to make their lives better?”

Typically, lawmakers want the cost of a policy change to be offset by budget revenue or reductions elsewhere. But in this case, there’s almost no agreed-upon revenue raisers or spending cuts in the annual $6 trillion budget that could cover such a whopping price tag.

Instead, some Republicans have argued that the tax breaks will pay for themselves, with the trickle-down revenue from potential economic growth. Trump’s tariffs floated this past week could provide another source of offsetting revenue.

Some Republicans argue there’s precedent for simply extending the tax cuts without offsetting the costs because they are not new changes but existing federal policy.

“If you’re just extending current law, we’re not raising taxes or lowering taxes,” said Sen. Mike Crapo, R-Idaho, the incoming chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, on Fox News.

He said the criticism that tax cuts would add to the deficit is “ridiculous.” There is a difference between taxes and spending, he said, “and we just have to get that message out to America.”

At the same time, the new Congress will also be considering spending reductions, particularly to food stamps and health care programs, goals long sought by conservatives as part of the annual appropriations process.

One cut is almost certain to fall on the COVID-19-era subsidy that helps defray the cost of health insurance for people who buy their own policies via the Affordable Care Act exchange.

The extra health care subsidies were extended through 2025 in Democratic President Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, which also includes various green energy tax breaks that Republicans want to roll back.

The House Democratic leader, Rep. Hakeem Jeffries of New York, scoffed at the Republican claim that they’ve won “some big, massive mandate” — when in fact, the House Democrats and Republicans essentially fought to a draw in the November election, with the GOP eking out a narrow majority.

“This notion about some mandate to make massive, far-right extreme policy changes, it doesn’t exist — it doesn’t exist,” Jeffries said.

Republicans are planning to use a budgetary process, called reconciliation, that allows majority passage in Congress, essentially along party lines, without the threat of a filibuster in the Senate that can stall out a bill’s advance unless 60 of the 100 senators agree.

It’s the same process Democrats have used when they had the power in Washington to approve the Inflation Reduction Act and Obama’s health care law over GOP objections.

Republicans have been here before with Trump and control of Congress, which is no guarantee they will be able to accomplish their goals, particularly in the face of resistance from Democrats.

Still, House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., who has been working closely with Trump on the agenda, has promised a “breakneck” pace in the first 100 days “because we have a lot to fix.”

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The story has been corrected to reflect that Lindsay Owens of the Groundwork Collaborative spoke of ‘income inequality,’ not ‘income equality.’

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WASHINGTON (AP) — President-elect Donald Trump has nominated Kash Patel to serve as FBI director, turning to a fierce ally to upend America’s premier law enforcement agency and rid the government of perceived “conspirators.” It’s the latest bombshell Trump has thrown at the Washington establishment and a test for how far Senate Republicans will go in confirming his nominees.

The selection is in keeping with Trump’s view that the government’s law enforcement and intelligence agencies require a radical transformation and his stated desire for retribution against supposed adversaries. It shows how Trump, still fuming over years of federal investigations that shadowed his first administration and later led to his indictment, is moving to place atop the FBI and Justice Department close allies he believes will protect rather than scrutinize him.

Patel “played a pivotal role in uncovering the Russia, Russia, Russia Hoax, standing as an advocate for truth, accountability, and the Constitution,” Trump wrote Saturday night in a social media post.

Patel’s nomination sets up what’s likely to be an explosive confirmation battle in the Senate just days after Trump’s first pick to lead the Justice Department, Matt Gaetz, withdrew his nomination amid intense scrutiny over sex trafficking allegations.

Patel is a lesser-known figure, but his nomination was still expected to cause shockwaves. He’s embraced Trump’s rhetoric about a “deep state,” called for a “comprehensive housecleaning” of government workers who are disloyal to Trump and has referred to journalists as traitors, promising to try to prosecute some reporters.

Trump’s nominees will have allies in what will be a Republican-controlled Senate next year, but his picks are not certain of confirmation. With a slim majority, Republicans can only lose a few defectors in the face of expected Democratic opposition — though as vice president, JD Vance would be able to break any tie votes.

But the president-elect had also raised the prospect of pushing his selections through without Senate approval using a congressional loophole that allows him to make appointments when the Senate is not in session.

Patel would replace Christopher Wray, who was appointed by Trump in 2017 but quickly fell out of favor with the president and his allies. FBI directors have 10-year terms that are meant to inoculate them from political influence.

His removal isn’t unexpected given Trump’s long-running public criticism of him and the FBI, particularly in the aftermath of federal investigations — and an FBI search of his Mar-a-Lago estate for classified documents two years ago — that resulted in indictments that are now poised to evaporate.

In his final months in office, Trump unsuccessfully pushed the idea of installing Patel as the deputy director at either the FBI or CIA in an effort to strengthen the president’s control of the intelligence community. William Barr, Trump’s attorney general, wrote in his memoir that he told then-chief of staff Mark Meadows that an appointment to Patel as deputy FBI director would happen “over my dead body.”

“Patel had virtually no experience that would qualify him to serve at the highest level of the world’s preeminent law enforcement agency,” Barr wrote.

Patel’s past proposals, if carried out, would lead to convulsive change for an agency tasked not only with investigating violations of federal law but also protecting the country from terrorist attacks, foreign espionage and other threats.

He’s called for dramatically reducing the agency’s footprint, a perspective that dramatically sets him apart from earlier directors who have sought additional resources for the bureau, and has suggested closing down the bureau’s headquarters in Washington and “reopen it the next day as a museum of the deep state” — Trump’s pejorative catch-all for the federal bureaucracy.

And though the Justice Department in 2021 halted the practice of secretly seizing reporters’ phone records during leak investigation, Patel has said he intends to aggressively hunt down government officials who leak information to reporters and change the law to make it easier to sue journalists.

During an interview with Steve Bannon last December, Patel said he and others “will go out and find the conspirators not just in government but in the media.”

“We’re going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections,” Patel said, referring to the 2020 presidential election in which Biden, the Democratic challenger, defeated Trump. “We’re going to come after you, whether it’s criminally or civilly. We’ll figure that out. But yeah, we’re putting you all on notice.”

Trump also announced Saturday that he would nominate Sheriff Chad Chronister, the top law enforcement officer in Hillsborough County, Florida, to serve as the administrator of the Drug Enforcement Agency.

Chronister is another Florida Republican named to Trump’s administration. He has worked for the Hillsborough County Sheriff’s Office since 1992 and became the top law enforcement officer in Hillsborough County 2017. He also worked closely with Trump’s choice for attorney general, Pam Bondi.

Patel, the child of Indian immigrants and a former public defender, spent several years as a Justice Department prosecutor before catching the Trump administration’s attention as a staffer for the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.

The panel’s then-chairman, Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif., was a strong Trump ally who tasked Patel with running the committee’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 campaign. Patel ultimately helped author what became known as the “Nunes Memo,” a four-page report that detailed how it said the Justice Department had erred in obtaining a warrant to surveil a former Trump campaign volunteer. The memo’s release faced vehement opposition from Wray and the Justice Department, who warned that it would be reckless to disclose sensitive information.

A subsequent inspector general report identified significant problems with FBI surveillance during the Russia investigation, but also found no evidence that the FBI had acted with partisan motives in conducting the probe and said there had been a legitimate basis to open the inquiry.

The Russia investigation fueled Patel’s suspicions of the FBI, the intelligence community and also the media, which he has called “the most powerful enemy the United States has ever seen.” Seizing on compliance errors in the FBI’s use of a spy program that officials say is vital for national security, Patel has accused the FBI of having “weaponized” its surveillance powers against innocent Americans.

Patel parlayed that work into influential administration roles on the National Security Council and later as chief of staff to acting Defense Secretary Christopher Miller.

He continued as a loyal Trump lieutenant even after he left office, accompanying the president-elect into court during his criminal trial in New York and asserting to reporters that Trump was the victim of a “constitutional circus.”

Since leaving government, Patel has found himself entangled in Trump’s legal woes, appearing two years ago before a federal grand jury that investigated Trump’s hoarding of classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida — a matter for which Trump was subsequently indicted.

Typically though not always, presidents retain the director they’ve inherited: President Joe Biden, for instance, kept Wray in place even though the director was named by Trump, and former President Barack Obama even asked Robert Mueller to stay on an extra two years even though Mueller was tapped by Obama’s predecessor, George W. Bush.

Trump had openly flirted with firing Wray during his first term, taking issue with Wray’s emphasis on the election interference threat from Russia at a time when Trump was focusing on China. He also described antifa, an umbrella term for leftist militants, as an ideology rather than an organization, contradicting Trump, who wants to designate it as a terror group.

The low-key Wray had been determined to bring stability to an institution riven by turbulence following the May 2017 firing of James Comey by Trump amid an FBI investigation into potential ties between Russia and Trump’s 2016 campaign.

Wray sought to turn the page on some of the controversies of Comey’s tenure. The FBI, for instance, fired a lead agent from the Russia investigation who sent derogatory text messages about Trump during the course of the inquiry and sidelined a deputy director under Comey who was a key figure in the probe. Wray also announced dozens of corrective actions meant to prevent some of the surveillance abuses that tainted the Russia investigation.

The FBI has worked to protect Trump this year following multiple assassination attempts and disrupted an Iranian murder-for-hire plot targeting the president-elect that resulted in criminal charges unsealed in November.

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Associated Press writer Jill Colvin in New York and Fatima Hussein in West Palm Beach, Florida, contributed to this report.

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CHICAGO (AP) — In the days after the presidential election, Sadie Perez began carrying pepper spray with her around campus. Her mom also ordered her and her sister a self-defense kit that included keychain spikes, a hidden knife key and a personal alarm.

It’s a response to an emboldened fringe of right-wing “manosphere” influencers who have seized on Republican Donald Trump ’s presidential win to justify and amplify misogynistic derision and threats online. Many have appropriated a 1960s abortion rights rallying cry, declaring “Your body, my choice” at women online and on college campuses.

For many women, the words represent a worrying harbinger of what might lie ahead as some men perceive the election results as a rebuke of reproductive rights and women’s rights.

“The fact that I feel like I have to carry around pepper spray like this is sad,” said Perez, a 19-year-old political science student in Wisconsin. “Women want and deserve to feel safe.”

Isabelle Frances-Wright, director of technology and society at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a think tank focusing on polarization and extremism, said she had seen a “very large uptick in a number of types of misogynistic rhetoric immediately after the election,” including some “extremely violent misogyny.”

“I think many progressive women have been shocked by how quickly and aggressively this rhetoric has gained traction,” she said.

The phrase “Your body, my choice” has been largely attributed to a post on the social platform X from Nick Fuentes, a Holocaust-denying white nationalist and far-right internet personality who dined at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club in Florida two years ago. In statements responding to criticism of that event, Trump said he had “never met and knew nothing about” Fuentes before he arrived.

Mary Ruth Ziegler, a law professor at the University of California, Davis School of Law, said the phrase transforms the iconic abortion rights slogan into an attack on women’s right to autonomy and a personal threat.

“The implication is that men should have control over or access to sex with women,” said Ziegler, a reproductive rights expert.

Fuentes’ post had 35 million views on X within 24 hours, according to a report by Frances-Wright’s think tank, and the phrase spread rapidly to other social media platforms.

Women on TikTok have reported seeing it inundate their comment sections. The slogan also has made its way offline with boys chanting it in middle schools or men directing it at women on college campuses, according to the Institute for Strategic Dialogue report and social media reports. One mother said her daughter heard the phrase on her college campus three times, the report said.

School districts in Wisconsin and Minnesota have sent notices about the language to parents. T-shirts emblazoned with the phrase were pulled off Amazon.

Perez said she has seen men respond to shared Snapchat stories for their college class with “Your body, my choice.”

“It makes me feel disgusted and infringed upon,” she said. “… It feels like going backwards.”

Misogynistic attacks have been part of the social media landscape for years. But Frances-Wright and others who track online extremism and disinformation said language glorifying violence against women or celebrating the possibility of their rights being stripped away has spiked since the election.

Online declarations for women to “Get back in the kitchen” or to “Repeal the 19th,” a reference to the constitutional amendment that gave women the right to vote, have spread rapidly. In the days surrounding the election, the extremism think tank found that the top 10 posts on X calling for repeal of the 19th Amendment received more than 4 million views collectively.

A man holding a sign with the words “Women Are Property” sparked an outcry at Texas State University. The man was not a student, faculty or staff, and was escorted off campus, according to the university’s president. The university is “exploring potential legal responses,” he said.

Anonymous rape threats have been left on the TikTok videos of women denouncing the election results. And on the far-flung reaches of the web, 4chan forums have called for “rape squads” and the adoption of policies in “The Handmaid’s Tale,” a dystopian book and TV series depicting the dehumanization and brutalization of women.

“What was scary here was how quickly this also manifested in offline threats,” Frances-Wright said, emphasizing that online discourse can have real-world impacts.

Previous violent rhetoric on 4chan has been connected to racially motivated and antisemitic attacks, including a 2022 shooting by a white supremacist in Buffalo that killed 10 people. Anti-Asian hate incidents also rose as politicians, including Trump, used words such as “Chinese virus” to describe the COVID-19 pandemic. And Trump’s language targeting Muslims and immigrants in his first campaign correlated with spikes in hate speech and attacks on these groups, Frances-Wright said.

The Global Project Against Hate and Extremism reported similar rhetoric, with “numerous violent misogynistic trends” gaining traction on right-wing platforms such 4chan and spreading to more mainstream ones such as X since the election.

Throughout the presidential race, Trump’s campaign leaned on conservative podcasts and tailored messaging toward disaffected young men. As Trump took the stage at the Republican National Convention over the summer, the song “It’s A Man’s Man’s Man’s World” by James Brown blared from the speakers.

One of several factors to his success this election was modestly boosting his support among men, a shift concentrated among younger voters, according to AP VoteCast, survey of more than 120,000 voters nationwide. But Trump also won support from 44% of women age 18 to 44, according to AP VoteCast.

To some men, Trump’s return to the White House is seen as a vindication, gender and politics experts said. For many young women, the election felt like a referendum on women’s rights and Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris ’ loss felt like a rejection of their own rights and autonomy.

“For some of these men, Trump’s victory represents a chance to reclaim a place in society that they think they are losing around these traditional gender roles,” Frances-Wright said.

None of the current online rhetoric is being amplified by Trump or anyone in his immediate orbit. But Trump has a long history of insulting women, and the spike in such language comes after he ran a campaign that was centered on masculinity and repeatedly attacked Harris over her race and gender. His allies and surrogates also used misogynistic language about Harris throughout the campaign.

“With Trump’s victory, many of these men felt like they were heard, they were victorious. They feel that they have potentially a supporter in the White House,” said Dana Brown, executive director of the Pennsylvania Center for Women and Politics.

Brown said some young men feel they’re victims of discrimination and have expressed mounting resentment for successes of the women’s rights movement, including #MeToo. The tension also has been influenced by socioeconomic struggles.

As women become the majority on college campuses and many professional industries see increasing gender diversity, it has “led to young men scapegoating women and girls, falsely claiming it’s their fault they’re not getting into college anymore as opposed to looking inward,” Brown said.

Perez, the political science student, said she and her sister have been leaning on each other, their mother and other women in their lives to feel safer amid the online vitriol. They text each other to make sure they got home safely. They have girls’ nights to celebrate wins, including a female majority in student government at their campus in the University of Wisconsin system.

“I want to encourage my friends and the women in my life to use their voices to call out this rhetoric and to not let fear take over,” she said.

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The Associated Press receives support from several private foundations to enhance its explanatory coverage of elections and democracy. See more about AP’s democracy initiative here. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

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WASHINGTON (AP) — With artificial intelligence at a pivotal moment of development, the federal government is about to transition from one that prioritized AI safeguards to one more focused on eliminating red tape.

That’s a promising prospect for some investors but creates uncertainty about the future of any guardrails on the technology, especially around the use of AI deepfakes in elections and political campaigns.

President-elect Donald Trump has pledged to rescind President Joe Biden’s sweeping AI executive order, which sought to protect people’s rights and safety without stifling innovation. He hasn’t specified what he would do in its place, but the platform of the Republican National Committee, which he recently reshaped, said AI development should be “rooted in Free Speech and Human Flourishing.”

It’s an open question whether Congress, soon to be fully controlled by Republicans, will be interested in passing any AI-related legislation. Interviews with a dozen lawmakers and industry experts reveal there is still interest in boosting the technology’s use in national security and cracking down on non-consensual explicit images.

Yet the use of AI in elections and in spreading misinformation is likely to take a backseat as GOP lawmakers turn away from anything they view as potentially suppressing innovation or free speech.

“AI has incredible potential to enhance human productivity and positively benefit our economy,” said Rep. Jay Obernolte, a California Republican widely seen as a leader in the evolving technology. “We need to strike an appropriate balance between putting in place the framework to prevent the harmful things from happening while at the same time enabling innovation.”

Artificial intelligence interests have been expecting sweeping federal legislation for years. But Congress, gridlocked on nearly every issue, failed to pass any artificial intelligence bill, instead producing only a series of proposals and reports.

Some lawmakers believe there is enough bipartisan interest around some AI-related issues to get a bill passed.

“I find there are Republicans that are very interested in this topic,” said Democratic Sen. Gary Peters, singling out national security as one area of potential agreement. “I am confident I will be able to work with them as I have in the past.”

It’s still unclear how much Republicans want the federal government to intervene in AI development. Few showed interest before this year’s election in regulating how the Federal Election Commission or the Federal Communications Commission handled AI-generated content, worrying that it would raise First Amendment issues at the same time that Trump’s campaign and other Republicans were using the technology to create political memes.

The FCC was in the middle of a lengthy process for developing AI-related regulations when Trump won the presidency. That work has since been halted under long-established rules covering a change in administrations.

Trump has expressed both interest and skepticism in artificial intelligence.

During a Fox Business interview earlier this year, he called the technology “very dangerous” and “so scary” because “there’s no real solution.” But his campaign and supporters also embraced AI-generated images more than their Democratic opponents. They often used them in social media posts that weren’t meant to mislead, but rather to further entrench Republican political views.

Elon Musk, Trump’s close adviser and a founder of several companies that rely on AI, also has shown a mix of concern and excitement about the technology, depending on how it is applied.

Musk used X, the social media platform he owns, to promote AI-generated images and videos throughout the election. Operatives from Americans for Responsible Innovation, a nonprofit focused on artificial intelligence, have publicly been pushing Trump to tap Musk as his top adviser on the technology.

“We think that Elon has a pretty sophisticated understating of both the opportunities and risks of advanced AI systems,” said Doug Calidas, a top operative from the group.

But Musk advising Trump on artificial intelligence worries others. Peters argued it could undercut the president.

“It is a concern,” said the Michigan Democrat. “Whenever you have anybody that has a strong financial interest in a particular technology, you should take their advice and counsel with a grain of salt.”

In the run-up to the election, many AI experts expressed concern about an eleventh-hour deepfake — a lifelike AI image, video or audio clip — that would sway or confuse voters as they headed to the polls. While those fears were never realized, AI still played a role in the election, said Vivian Schiller, executive director of Aspen Digital, part of the nonpartisan Aspen Institute think tank.

“I would not use the term that I hear a lot of people using, which is it was the dog that didn’t bark,” she said of AI in the 2024 election. “It was there, just not in the way that we expected.”

Campaigns used AI in algorithms to target messages to voters. AI-generated memes, though not lifelike enough to be mistaken as real, felt true enough to deepen partisan divisions.

A political consultant mimicked Joe Biden’s voice in robocalls that could have dissuaded voters from coming to the polls during New Hampshire’s primary if they hadn’t been caught quickly. And foreign actors used AI tools to create and automate fake online profiles and websites that spread disinformation to a U.S. audience.

Even if AI didn’t ultimately influence the election outcome, the technology made political inroads and contributed to an environment where U.S. voters don’t feel confident that what they are seeing is true. That dynamic is part of the reason some in the AI industry want to see regulations that establish guidelines.

“President Trump and people on his team have said they don’t want to stifle the technology and they do want to support its development, so that is welcome news,” said Craig Albright, the top lobbyist and senior vice president at The Software Alliance, a trade group whose members include OpenAI, Oracle and IBM. “It is our view that passing national laws to set the rules of the road will be good for developing markets for the technology.”

AI safety advocates during a recent meeting in San Francisco made similar arguments, according to Suresh Venkatasubramanian, director of the Center for Tech Responsibility at Brown University.

“By putting literal guardrails, lanes, road rules, we were able to get cars that could roll a lot faster,” said Venkatasubramanian, a former Biden administration official who helped craft White House principles for approaching AI.

Rob Weissman, co-president of the advocacy group Public Citizen, said he’s not hopeful about the prospects for federal legislation and is concerned about Trump’s pledge to rescind Biden’s executive order, which created an initial set of national standards for the industry. His group has advocated for federal regulation of generative AI in elections.

“The safeguards are themselves ways to promote innovation so that we have AI that’s useful and safe and doesn’t exclude people and promotes the technology in ways that serve the public interest,” he said.

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TBILISI, Georgia (AP) — More than 100 demonstrators were arrested overnight in Georgia as protesters clashed with police following the government’s decision to suspend negotiations to join the European Union, the country’s Interior Ministry said Saturday.

It was the second straight night of protests after Prime Minister Irakli Kobakhidze of the country’s ruling Georgian Dream party announced the decision the previous day. Demonstrators faced off against police late Friday in a number of major Georgian cities, including the capital, Tbilisi, and the Black Sea port of Batumi.

The Associated Press saw protesters in Tbilisi being chased and beaten by police as demonstrators rallied in front of the country’s parliament building.

Riot police used water cannons to push protesters away from the building and later moved to force them farther back along Rustaveli Avenue, the city’s main boulevard.

Police also used heavy force against members of the media and used loudspeakers to shout profanities and insults at the crowds.

Georgian Dream’s disputed victory in the country’s Oct. 26 parliamentary election, which was widely seen as a referendum on Georgia’s aspirations to join the European Union, has sparked massive demonstrations and led to an opposition boycott of the parliament.

The opposition has said that the vote was rigged with the help of Russia, Georgia’s former imperial master, with Moscow hoping to keep Tbilisi in its orbit.

Georgian President Salome Zourabichvili joined protesters on Thursday after accusing the government of declaring war on its own people. In an address to the nation Friday, she urged police not to use force against protesters.

“This is evident in every way — no one is willing to accept a Russified Georgia, a Georgia deprived of its constitution, or a Georgia in the hands of an illegitimate government and parliament,” Zourabichvili said.

“That is why so many of you are out here today: I see you. I see you on Rustaveli Avenue and in cities across Georgia: Batumi, Kutaisi, Zugdidi, Akhmeta, Lagodekhi, Telavi. It is unprecedented for citizens of Georgia to rise up simultaneously and spontaneously in this way.”

Kobakhidze, the prime minister, characterized the protests Saturday as “violent demonstrations.” He said that unspecified “foreign entities” wished to see the “Ukrainization” of Georgia with a “Maidan-style scenario” – a reference to Ukraine’s 2014 Maidan revolution.

Kobakhidze also said that Georgia remained committed to European integration.

“Once again, we pledge to the Georgian public, which expressed solid trust in us during the Oct. 26 elections, that no one will shake the peace and stability of Georgia,” he said. “Despite artificial barriers, Georgia will persistently continue its progress toward European integration.”

The government’s announcement that it was suspending negotiations to join the EU came hours after the European Parliament adopted a resolution that condemned last month’s vote as neither free nor fair. It said the election represented another manifestation of Georgia’s continued democratic backsliding “for which the ruling Georgian Dream party is fully responsible.”

European election observers said October’s vote took place in a divisive atmosphere marked by instances of bribery, double voting and physical violence.

The EU granted Georgia candidate status in December 2023 on condition that it meet the bloc’s recommendations, but put its accession on hold and cut financial support earlier this year after the passage of a “foreign influence” law widely seen as a blow to democratic freedoms.

EU lawmakers urged a rerun of the parliamentary vote within a year under thorough international supervision and by an independent election administration. They also called on the EU to impose sanctions and limit formal contacts with the Georgian government.

The Georgian prime minister fired back, denouncing what he described as a “cascade of insults” from the EU politicians and declaring that “the ill-wishers of our country have turned the European Parliament into a blunt weapon of blackmail against Georgia, which is a great disgrace for the European Union.”

Kobakhidze also said Georgia would reject any budgetary grants from the EU until the end of 2028.

Critics have accused Georgian Dream — established by Bidzina Ivanishvili, a shadowy billionaire who made his fortune in Russia — of becoming increasingly authoritarian and tilted toward Moscow. The party recently pushed through laws similar to those used by the Kremlin to crack down on freedom of speech and LGBTQ+ rights.

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MADISON, Wis. (AP) — Wisconsin’s election commission leader quietly certified Donald Trump ’s victory on Friday, moving past the chaos that surrounded the 2020 election results in the battleground state.

Commission Chair Ann Jacobs certified results that show Trump won the state with 1,697,626 votes compared to Democrat Kamala Harris’ 1,668,229 votes during a morning Zoom teleconference that lasted six minutes.

The certification felt almost anticlimactic compared with the aftermath of the 2020 election, when Trump refused to accept that Joe Biden had won the state by about 21,000 votes.

Trump forced a recount in Dane and Milwaukee counties, the state’s two Democratic strongholds, but it didn’t change the outcome. Trump later sued to disqualify more than 221,000 ballots in the two counties. He wanted to disqualify absentee ballots cast early and in-person, saying there wasn’t a proper written request made for the ballots; absentee ballots cast by people who claimed “indefinitely confined” status; absentee ballots collected by poll workers at Madison parks; and absentee ballots where clerks filled in missing information on ballot envelopes.

The state Supreme Court dismissed the case in December 2020, finding four of Trump’s claims were filed too late and the other was without merit. A federal judge that same month dismissed another lawsuit filed by two Republican legislators, voting rights groups and others seeking to overturn the results.

Facing pressure from Trump, Wisconsin Assembly Speaker Robin Vos hired former state Supreme Court Justice Michael Gableman in the spring of 2021 to investigate allegations of fraud and abuse related to the election.

The probe ultimately turned up nothing. The state Office of Lawyer Regulation filed a complaint against Gableman last week accusing him of violating multiple rules of conduct during the investigation. The state Supreme Court will decide what sanctions, if any, Gableman will face.

The election commission’s nonpartisan administrator, Meagan Wolfe, found herself the target of conspiracy theorists and election skeptics who falsely claimed she was part of a plot to rig the 2020 election for Biden. Republican legislators are trying to fire her but the commission has filed a lawsuit to keep in her post. That case is currently before the state Supreme Court.

Trump’s national victory in November has calmed conservative anger but a vocal faction of the GOP remains deeply skeptical of election processes, particularly the use of mail ballots and scanners to tally votes. Still, several states that saw tumultuous certifications during the 2020 election and 2022 midterms have smoothly approved their results in recent weeks, including Arizona, Michigan, Nevada and New Mexico.

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TBILISI, Georgia (AP) — Thousands of demonstrators protesting the Georgian government’s decision to suspend negotiations to join the European Union rallied outside the parliament and clashed with police for a second straight night on Friday.

The night before, police used water cannons, pepper spray and tear gas to disperse protesters who took to the streets of Tbilisi, the Georgian capital, after Prime Minister Irakli Kobakhidze of the ruling Georgian Dream party announced the suspension. The interior ministry said it detained 43 people during the protests.

On Friday evening, protesters again swarmed the parliament, with some trying to break the metal gates to the building. Riot police used water cannons to push them away from the building and later moved to force them farther back along the Rustaveli Avenue, the city’s main boulevard.

Some of the protesters used garbage bins and benches to try to build barricades.

Clashes between police and protesters also erupted late Friday in the Black Sea port of Batumi.

Georgian Dream’s disputed victory in the Oct. 26 election, which was widely seen as a referendum on the country’s aspirations to join the European Union, has sparked massive demonstrations and led to an opposition boycott of the parliament. The opposition said the vote was rigged under the influence of Russia seeking to keep Georgia in its orbit.

President Salome Zourabichvili joined protesters on Thursday after accusing the government of declaring “war” on its own people. In Friday’s address to the nation, Zourabichvili urged police not to use force against protesters.

The Georgian president, who has a largely ceremonial role, has declared that the ruling party rigged the election with the help of Russia, Georgia’s former imperial master.

The government’s announcement that it was suspending negotiations to join the EU came hours after the European Parliament adopted a resolution that condemned last month’s vote as neither free nor fair, representing yet another manifestation of the continued democratic backsliding “for which the ruling Georgian Dream party is fully responsible.”

European election observers said October’s vote took place in a divisive atmosphere marked by instances of bribery, double voting and physical violence.

The EU granted Georgia candidate status in December 2023 on condition that it meet the bloc’s recommendations, but put its accession on hold and cut financial support earlier this year after the passage of a “foreign influence” law widely seen as a blow to democratic freedoms.

EU lawmakers urged for a rerun of the parliamentary vote within a year under thorough international supervision and by an independent election administration. They also called on the EU to impose sanctions and limit formal contacts with the Georgian government.

The Georgian prime minister fired back, denouncing what he described as a “cascade of insults” from the EU politicians and declaring that “the ill-wishers of our country have turned the European Parliament into a blunt weapon of blackmail against Georgia, which is a great disgrace for the European Union.”

“We will continue on our path toward the European Union; however, we will not allow anyone to keep us in a constant state of blackmail and manipulation, which is utterly disrespectful to our country and society,” Kobakhidze said. “We must clearly show certain European politicians and bureaucrats, who are completely devoid of European values, that they must speak to Georgia with dignity, not through blackmail and insults.”

Kobakhidze also said Georgia would reject any budgetary grants from the EU until the end of 2028.

Critics have accused Georgian Dream — established by Bidzina Ivanishvili, a shadowy billionaire who made his fortune in Russia — of becoming increasingly authoritarian and tilted toward Moscow. The party recently pushed through laws similar to those used by the Kremlin to crack down on freedom of speech and LGBTQ+ rights.

The EU suspended Georgia’s membership application process indefinitely in June, after parliament passed a law requiring organizations that receive more than 20% of their funding from abroad to register as “pursuing the interest of a foreign power,” similar to a Russian law used to discredit organizations critical of the government.

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