BY APPOINTMENT:  President-elect Donald Trump is rapidly revealing appointments to major positions in his new administration including people to handle immigration, the environment, and the State Department.

  Trump is expected to name Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, the man he used to deride as “Little Marco,” to be Secretary of State. In Trump’s world, people absorb insults in exchange for power.

  Rubio has said that the war in Ukraine “needs to be brought to a conclusion.”

  Former White House aide Stephen Miller, who has spent the last two years working on detailed plans for mass deportation of illegal immigrants, is expected to be named deputy chief of staff with a wide portfolio of responsibilities, including dealing with undocumented immigrants.

  “Trump will unleash the vast arsenal of federal powers to implement the most spectacular migration crackdown,” Miller told The NY Times a year ago, adding, “The immigration legal activists won’t know what’s happening.”

  One tactic Miller said the next Trump administration would use is the emergency health powers act to cite “severe strains of the flu, tuberculosis, scabies, other respiratory illnesses like RSV and so on, or just a general issue of mass migration being a public health threat and conveying a variety of communicable diseases.”

  Trump also named former Republican Rep. Lee Zeldin of New York to lead the Environmental Protection Agency and be the point man for gutting climate regulations. The 44-year-old  Zeldin voted against certifying the results of the 2020 election.

  Trump, who has called global warming and climate change a hoax, has set as a primary target Biden administration’s effort to speed transition from gasoline-powered cars to electric vehicles. Trump had pledged during his campaign to “kill” and “cancel” EPA rules that combat global warming by restricting fossil fuel emissions. 

  When he was in Congress, Zeldin voted against environmental bills 85 percent of the time, but Trump said in a statement, “He will ensure fair and swift deregulatory decisions that will be enacted in a way to unleash the power of American businesses, while at the same time maintaining the highest environmental standards, including the cleanest air and water on the planet.” 

  Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who expects to reign over healthcare matters, said over the weekend that he expects to replace 600 people at the National Institutes of Health, which he believes has been “captured” by the pharmaceutical industry.

THE TRUMP WHISPERER: Tesla billionaire Elon Musk is reported to be  ensconced at the Mar-a-Lago Club advising president-elect Trump on appointments and plans for his new administration.

   Musk donated $100 million to Trump’s campaign, so he has paid for access and forgiveness of conflict of interest. He is a major government contractor and the Defense Department relies on his company, SpaceX. His companies have received a combined total of $15 billion in federal grants and he might expect more under Trump. Musk might even get a pass on investigations of crashes involving his self-driving cars.

  Musk says he has been promised an appointment as chief of the Department of Government Efficiency and that he would cut $2 trillion in federal spending, a recipe for economic crash, according to some economists.

  The federal government spent over $6.7 trillion in the fiscal year ending in September, running a deficit of more than $1.8 trillion. Trump said of Musk, “He’s a great cost-cutter, and he’ll cut costs without anybody even knowing it.”

ELECTION ROUNDUP:

• Former news anchor Kari Lake, a Trump loyalist, has officially lost the Arizona Senate race to Democrat Ruben Gallego, 50.03 percent to 47.76 percent. Lake has described herself as “Trump in a dress.” 
• The NY Post reports that Melania Trump refuses to meet with First Lady Jill Biden because of the FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago.

TRUE CRIME: A 52-year-old Indiana man has been found guilty of the infamous “Delphi” murders of two teenage girls that has been the subject of podcasts and a fascination of true crime fans. 

  Back in 2017 the bodies of two girls, Liberty German, 14, and Abigail Williams, 13, were found a day after they went missing during a hike in Delphi, Indiana, about 80 miles northwest of Indianapolis. Richard Allen of Delphi was not arrested until five years later after investigators strung together video of a man from one of the girls’ cellphones, an unspent bullet at the scene, and the accounts of witnesses who had seen a man on the hiking trail.

  Allen was interviewed during the initial investigation and admitted being on the trail. It wasn’t until October 2022 that investigators found a gun at Allen’s home and linked it to the bullet found near the bodies. Allen confessed to killing the girls with a boxcutter, but his lawyers later argued that his statement was given under mental duress.

THE OBIT PAGE: Trevor Sorbie, a celebrity hairstylist credited with creating the “wedge” cut made popular in the 1970s by Olympic figure skater Dorothy Hamill, died last week at his home in Fareham, England. He was 75.

  The wedge cut was short at the nape of the neck then angled longer along the jawline. “The wedge captured the spirit of the time and was flaunted in nightclubs around the world,” Sorbie said on his salon’s website. He used to say that hair could be “revolutionary.”

THE SPIN RACK: Longtime political journalist Chris Wallace, once a fixture at NBC, says he’s leaving CNN after three years to explore new things like streaming or podcasting. Our bet is that CNN let him go after the election because they don’t need him anymore. — Twenty-five of 43 monkeys that escaped from a South Carolina research lab have been recovered. 

BELOW THE FOLD: The Mattel toy company listed a website on the packaging for its new “Wicked” dolls spun off from the characters in the Broadway play and the new movie based on the same. The website Mattel printed has a typographical error so it’s really a link to a porn website.