REGIME CHANGE: Donald Trump with a casual re-posting of someone else’s social media message confirmed that he plans to declare a national emergency and use the military to execute his plan for mass deportations of illegal immigrants.

  About 4 am yesterday on his Truth Social website Trump responded to a post by Tom Fitton, who runs the conservative group Judicial Watch, saying that the Trump administration would “declare a national emergency and will use military assets” to address illegal immigration “through a mass deportation program.”

  Trump reposted Fitton’s message with the single word, “TRUE!!!”

  During his first term Trump declared an emergency to divert money from the military for building the southern border wall, which was never finished. Among the Trump team’s current plans are expanding so-called “expedited removal” of immigrants without legal process and denying citizenship to the babies of undocumented immigrants born on US soil.

  Trump’s designated “border czar” Thomas Homan has said he would “help to organize and run the largest deportation operation this country’s ever seen.”

  Trump named another Fox host to his cabinet yesterday …  Sean Duffy, a former Republican congressman from Wisconsin who is a Fox Business host, to head the transportation department. Duffy’s wife, Rachel Campos-Duffy, is a Fox News host. 

  The president-elect is reported to have told his staff that he’s standing by the appointment of Fox News host Pete Hegseth to be Secretary of Defense despite the revelation that his nominee was accused of sexual assault and has white supremacist tattoos. 

AIR HOCKEY: A lawyer representing two women who have testified that Donald Trump’s Attorney General nominee Matt Gaetz paid them for sex told several news outlets that one of the women described seeing Gaetz having sex with an underage girl at a party in 2017. Legal documents suggest that Gaetz was witnessed having sex with the girl on an air hockey table.

  The lawyer, Joel Leppard, told reporters that his clients testified to that before the House Ethics Committee, which was investigating stories about Gaetz having sex with young women and using illicit drugs. Leppard’s two clients testified that they were paid for sex via the app Venmo.

 Gaetz resigned as a Florida member of Congress last week just one day before the Ethics Committee was set to release their report. Because Gaetz is no longer a representative, the potentially damning report has been tabled for now. But not on an air hockey table. 

THE WAR ROOM: More than 100 trucks carrying aid into Gaza over the weekend were stopped at gunpoint, looted, and destroyed according to the United nations aide agency, UNRWA. Reports so far have not identified who did the looting.

  Israel has been letting less aid into Gaza and the loss of the convoy makes the situation more dire.

MYSTERIOUS RUSSIAN DEATH SYNDROME: Russian ballet dancer Vladimir Shklyarov, an outspoken critic of Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, fell 60 feet to his death from a building on Saturday. The 39-year-old married father of two was the highest-ranking dancer at the Mariinsky Theater in St. Petersburg.

  Back in 2022 Shklyarov had posted on Facebook, among other comments that, “Friends! I am against the war in Ukraine! I am for the people, for a peaceful sky above our heads.” Now he joins a growing list of Putin critics who have inexplicably fallen from buildings or been found dead. 

SPIDERS ON A PLANE: Customs officers in Lima, Peru last week stopped a South Korean man travelling home who had a suspiciously swollen belly. They asked him to lift his shirt. They found that he was carrying 320 tarantulas, 110 centipedes, and nine bullet ants, whose bite can cause temporary paralysis. All of the creatures were native to the Peruvian Amazon, some on the endangered list.

  The illegal trade in exotic pets is worth billions of dollars a year.

THE OBIT PAGE: Arthur Frommer, whose “Europe on 5 Dollars a Day” guidebooks spurred Americans to take budget vacations abroad, has died at age 95.

   Frommer didn’t just tell his readers what to see, but where to eat and stay within a budget. “It struck a chord and became an immediate best-seller,” he recalled in an interview with The Associated Press in 2007. He hit the market just when commercial air travel was making it quick and affordable to cross the Atlantic.

  Frommer began writing about travel in the 1950s while serving in the Army in Europe. His first was a guidebook for American soldiers overseas that sold out. He self-published “Europe on 5 Dollars a Day” in 1957.

  Time and prices ultimately overran the Frommer guides. The last edition was titled “Europe from $95 a Day” when even a hotel was at least $100.

THE SPIN RACK: The Georgia Court of Appeals abruptly canceled oral arguments on Donald Trump’s appeal of a state court ruling allowing continued prosecution of the 2020 election interference case against the president-elect and several of his allies. The court gave no explanation and it’s uncertain what may happen to the case. — Eric Hovde, the Republican Senate candidate in Wisconsinwho’s been claiming there was potential fraud in the election, finally conceded to incumbent Democrat Tammy Baldwin. —  Heather Rhiannon Morgan, who went by the moniker “Crocodile of Wall Street,”  was sentenced in federal court to 18 months in prison for helping her husband launder some 120,000 bitcoins — now worth billions of dollars — that he admitted to stealing from global exchange Bitfinex in 2016. Her husband, Ilya “Dutch” Lichtenstein, was sentenced last week to five years in prison. — Three people died in Manhattan yesterday as a homeless man went on a stabbing spree.

BELOW THE FOLD: You may have heard of a “flat tax,” a tax at which everyone is taxed at the same rate.

  Denmark has decided to levy a tax on methane emissions from livestock, essentially a “flatulence tax.”

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