Trump administration takes shape with high-profile appointments under way

US news outlet the Washington Post is reporting that Donald Trump spoke with Russian President Vladimir Putin on Wednesday.

Trump is said to have warned Putin to not escalate the war in Ukraine and mentioned America’s “sizeable military presence in Europe”, the Post, external reported.

The BBC has not been able to independently verify this report.

Trump was projected as the winner of the US presidential election in the early hours of Wednesday, 6 November – meaning the two leaders would have talked in the hours after that victory was announced.

When asked for confirmation of the call, Trump’s communications director Steven Cheung said: “We do not comment on private calls between President Trump and other world leaders”. But he said leaders have begun the process of reaching out to the president-elect.

During his campaign, Trump repeatedly said he could end the war in Ukraine “in a day” but has never elaborated on how that could happen.

Sam Cabral
Reporting from Washington DC

Donald Trump has weighed in on the horse race over who will lead the new Republican majority in the Senate.

John Cornyn of Texas, John Thune of South Dakota and Rick Scott of Florida are considered to be the top contenders to replace Kentucky’s Mitch McConnell, who will step away from the post after nearly two decades.

Though Trump did not endorse any of the men, he wrote on X that “any Republican Senator seeking the coveted LEADERSHIP position in the United States Senate must agree to Recess Appointments (in the Senate!), without which we will not be able to get people confirmed in a timely manner.”

Recess appointments allow the US president to fill judicial vacancies while the Senate is on break.

Trump said that positions needed to be “filled IMMEDIATELY”, and claimed that Democrats “are looking to ram through their Judges as the Republicans fight over Leadership”.

Billionaire ally Elon Musk agreed with the president-elect in a post of his own, shared less than a minute after Trump’s post.

Scott, who was on Fox News earlier talking up his resume, also quickly replied: “I will do whatever it takes to get your nominations through as quickly as possible”.

On Saturday, Cornyn pledged that – if elected leader – Republicans’ “first order of business” would be to confirm Trump’s new cabinet, with the Senate holding extended sessions if necessary.

As we reported earlier, Joe Biden has been at Rehoboth Beach in Delaware and is expected to head to the White House later today.

In pictures, Biden can be seen taking a stroll along the beach with first lady Jill Biden in the days since the tide turned in US politics, following Donald Trump’s win in the election.

The trip to the beach comes ahead of a busy week for Biden, who will be meeting with Israeli President Herzog on Tuesday before his sit-down with president-elect Trump on Wednesday.

Nada Tawfik and Regan Morris
BBC News in Palm Beach, Florida

Donald Trump’s Florida residence and private club Mar-a-Lago is once again the Winter White House – the place to be seen for West Wing hopefuls as the US president-elect assembles a new administration behind its opulent doors.

While President Joe Biden will remain in office until January, this part of Florida has become a rival centre of political power in America.

Just two years after an FBI raid found classified documents about US nuclear weapons and spy satellites stored in a bathroom, an eclectic mix of insiders are swarming to Mar-a-Lago, which is patrolled by robot dogs and armed guards on boats.

For those not blessed with an invitation to stay at Mar-a-Lago itself, the hotels and restaurants around nearby West Palm Beach are packed with office-seekers jostling for influence in the new administration and supporters celebrating Trump’s victory.

• For more on this, read the full story that gives a glimpse inside the political movers and shakers descending on West Palm Beach for a chance to mingle with Trump and his closest allies.

Let’s bring you more lines from National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan’s interview with the BBC’s US partner, CBS.

Sullivan says the White House will spend its remaining $6bn (£4.6bn) of funding for Ukraine before Donald Trump’s presidential inauguration in January.

He says the Biden administration’s main goal in its remaining months will be “to put Ukraine in the strongest possible position on the battlefield so that it is ultimately in the strongest possible position at the negotiating table”.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has demanded that Ukraine cede large swaths of territory as a precondition to peace talks, while Kyiv has adamantly refused to do so.

On the Middle East conflict, Sullivan says he expects progress on efforts to end the fighting in Gaza and southern Lebanon, and to free the Israeli hostages held by Hamas.

“At some point, the Israeli government wants to do a deal that gets its citizens back home,” he says.

Questions loom over Trump’s Ukraine planpublished at 18:30 Greenwich Mean Time 10 November

Anna Foster
Reporting from Washington DC

When we hear who Donald Trump’s new Secretary of State will be, we’ll get a better idea about what he’s planning to do on foreign policy – particularly his approach to things like the war in Ukraine.

There are two quite distinct paths he could choose.

The US has supported Ukraine with a huge amount of state-of-the-art weaponry. That’s expensive. Donald Trump has promised to improve the American economy, so cutting off or reducing that pricey commitment – and spending domestically instead – would play well with his voting base.

But last time he was president, he managed to achieve some really audacious worldwide successes.

He forged a relationship with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un after starting his term with a war of words between them. In the Middle East, the Abraham Accords – in which the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain recognised and began diplomatic relations with Israel – was also an achievement on the world stage.

So would he try to follow those up with another big flourish, and become the man who managed to end the war in Ukraine? He’s on decent terms with Presidents Zelensky and Putin, so it’s not an outrageous suggestion that he may be able to broker an end to the conflict.

Right now, we don’t know which choice he’ll make. But we won’t need to wait too long to find out.

President Joe Biden is set to meet President-elect Donald Trump at the White House on Wednesday.

The pair will discuss “top priorities” for domestic and foreign policy, US National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan tells BBC’s US partner CBS News.

He adds that the president will urge Trump’s incoming administration to not walk away from Ukraine, saying it could spark more instability in Europe.

Sullivan says Biden’s top message to the president-elect will be his commitment to ensure a peaceful transfer of power, and he will also talk to Trump about what’s happening in Europe, Asia and the Middle East.

Sullivan also says they will talk about how Trump will take on these issues when he is in office.

While the election has come to an end with the victory of Donald Trump, US politics is still chock full of events. Here’s a quick rundown of what to expect this week:

• On Tuesday, a judge will decide whether Trump’s criminal conviction related to hush money paid to a porn star should be overturned, following the US Supreme Court’s ruling on presidential immunity
• On Wednesday, Trump is set to meet Biden at the White House, a customary meeting between the outgoing and incoming presidents
• Also on Wednesday, Republican senators will choose who will lead their majority when the president-elect returns to the White House

Besides these, we’re still waiting for the remaining election results – including the final seats in the House of Representatives – and we expect more announcements on who’s in and who’s out of Trump’s next administration.

We’ve been following them all closely for months, but where are the key players in the US election spending their Sundays?

President-elect Donald Trump is at his private club Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Florida. There with him is his running mate JD Vance.

Vice-President Kamala Harris is in Washington DC.

And President Joe Biden is in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, but will head to the White House later today.

A key message of Donald Trump’s campaign was his promise of mass deportations and a major crackdown on illegal border crossings.

Trump has called immigration a priority that will begin on the first day of his presidency.

So how will his plan work?

Tom Homan served under the last Trump adminstration as the acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Homan is also rumoured to be part of Trump’s next administration, and he was just speaking with Fox News about immigration.

Homan said it would be a “well targeted, planned operation”.

“When we go out there, it’s going to be done in a humane manner,” he said. “These people will be well taken care of.”

But not much else was offered by Holman in the actual plan, how it would be enforced, or how much it would cost taxpayers.

Trump ally Vivek Ramaswamy has joined the flurry of political analysts on Sunday morning television, discussing the president-elect’s plans.

Ramaswamy, who joined the Trump campaign after shelving his own presidential aspirations, says he was not sure what role he might play in US politics, telling ABC News “there’s a couple great options on the table”.

He did not elaborate on if that might include a role in Trump’s administration.

The conversation then turned to Trump’s immigration plans.

Trump has repeatedly pledged to remove undocumented migrants throughout his campaign, but the incoming administration hasn’t provided detailed plans on how it would implement the Republican’s vision.

Ramaswamy told ABC News the president-elect would focus on “undocumented immigrants, illegal migrants who have really no place in this country, anybody who’s committed a crime”.

“Automatically that already is the largest mass deportation in American history,” he says.

• To learn more about Donald Trump’s proposed immigration policy, you can read our explainer here

Now that the Republican Party has secured the Senate, they need to choose a majority leader.

The party will get together on Wednesday to make that decision, and one of the names being floated is Florida Senator Rick Scott.

Scott was just speaking on Fox News, pushing his case to be named to the powerful role.

“I’ve brought people together, I’ve found common ground,” Scott says, adding that to get Trump’s agenda done, “you’re going to have to bring everyone together”.

Scott brings up his background in business and as the former Florida Governor, saying he is a “deal-doer” who can sit down with Democrats.

Scott also mentions his “great relationship” with Mike Johnson, the House Speaker.

John Thune and John Cornyn are two other names being floated as potential Senate majority leaders.

More now from the morning television programmes in the US, where Trump ally Jim Jordan has had a combative interview with CNN’s State of the Union co-anchor Dana Bash.

Jordan is a hardline Republican who chairs the influential House Judiciary Committee, where he heads a subcommittee on the “weaponization of the federal government”.

Jordan was asked if the president-elect would seek revenge on his political opponents when he was in the White House.

During his campaign, Trump called some Democratic lawmakers the “enemy from within”, and has previously suggested investigations could be launched into several of his opponents.

But Jordan refused to be drawn in to how Trump might act when he is in the White House, instead pointing backward to his first term in 2016. Jordan says Trump never locked up Hillary Clinton, despite it being his catchphrase during that campaign.

Bash then pushed Jordan to respond to how Trump might act in his second term.

“I don’t think any of that’s going to happen because we’re the party who is against political prosecution,” Jordan said.

Israeli President Isaac Herzog is due to meet US President Joe Biden at the White House on Tuesday.

They’ll discuss the situations in Gaza and Lebanon, according to a statement from Herzog’s office.

The following day, Biden will meet Trump in the Oval Office, marking their first meeting since the election.

Former US House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi says she told Vice-President Kamala Harris that she’s proud of her following her election loss to Donald Trump.

In an interview with the New York Times, external, Pelosi says she thanked Harris for “giving us hope with great dignity”.

“Obviously, it takes time to absorb an election. It takes actually a while to understand how certain things have happened. But they did happen, and she accepts that,” she says.

“For me, it was emotional to have the conversation in a way that was praiseworthy of her patriotic leadership but sad for her personally.”

As we reported a little earlier, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said he has spoken with President-elect Trump three times “in the last few days”.

Netanyahu is not the only political leader who has been on the other end of the phone to Trump since Wednesday’s election result.

We’ve reported on conversations with Ukrainian President Zelensky, Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum and the head of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen among others.

As a reminder, Trump won’t officially become president until inauguration day on 20 January 2025.

Tulsi Gabbard, a former Democrat who became a key Donald Trump ally during this election, has just been speaking on Fox and Friends.

The former congresswoman and military veteran is a member of Trump’s transition team – the group who will select political appointees and set priorities for the incoming administration.

And while no real clues were given as to who would be joining Trump’s team, she did speak about “loyalty”.

“Those that he is bringing with him into his administration, I can assure you, will be people who are committed to executing his vision, his promise to the American people.”

On the Sunday morning television shows in the US, much of the focus is on how the Democratic Party lost the election.

Senator Bernie Sanders has just been speaking with CNN, where he said the working class is angry, “and they have a reason to be angry”.

“We are living in an economy today now where the people on top are doing phenomenally well, while 60% of our people are living pay cheque to pay cheque,” Sanders, an independent, says

Sanders says what Trump did well in his campaign was say “I feel your pain. I know that you’re hurting, and I have an explanation”.

Sanders goes on to say Trump’s claims of economic woes being caused by millions of migrants crossing the border was “bogus”. He says corporate greed is the true reason and it must be tackled by politicians, saying the Democratic Party needs to listen to the working class.

Benjamin Netanyahu may have said he is looking to build on his previous relationship with Donald Trump – but there are no guarantees Trump will give the Israeli leader all that he wants.

Netanyahu called Trump the “best friend Israel has ever had in the White House” and he was also one of the first national leaders to congratulate the new president-elect.

Trump previously won favour by scrapping an Iran nuclear deal that Israel opposed and by recognising Jerusalem as Israel’s capital.

But Trump has said he is not keen on expensive wars and takes issue with some of Israel’s settlements in the occupied West Bank. He has also urged Israel to finish the war in Gaza quickly.

Recent polls suggested that more than two-thirds of Israelis wanted to see Trump back in the White House – but there are those who caution about his unpredictability and his approach.

Lucy Williamson takes a more in depth look at this here.

International reaction to the US election continues this afternoon with the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has said he and Trump “see eye to eye” on the “Iranian threat” and the “danger posed by it”.

In a statement, Netanyahu says the pair have spoken three times “in the last few days” – calling them “important” conversations that were designed to build on the relationship between the two countries.

His statement also touches on the recent attacks on Israeli football fans in Amsterdam.

The prime minister says “we will do what needs to be done to protect ourselves and our citizens.”