Democrats spent more than $20 million last year to end then-Representative Lori Chavez-DeRemer’s congressional career. Now, however, the Republican they worked so hard to defeat is their favorite nominee for President-Elect Donald Trump’s Cabinet.

Trump’s selection of Chavez-DeRemer for labor secretary came as a pleasant surprise to many Democrats and union leaders, who expected him to follow past Republican presidents and name a conservative hostile to organized labor. But Chavez-DeRemer endeared herself to unions during her two years in Congress. A former mayor of an Oregon suburb who narrowly won her seat in 2022, she was one of just three House Republicans to co-sponsor the labor movement’s top legislative priority: a bill known as the PRO Act, which would make unionizing easier and expand labor protections for union members.

After Chavez-DeRemer’s nomination was announced, two senior Democratic senators, Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Patty Murray of Washington State, issued cautiously optimistic statements about her—a rare sentiment for Democrats to express about any Trump nominee. In addition, Sean O’Brien, the Teamsters president who spoke at last year’s Republican National Convention and whose union stayed neutral in the presidential race after repeatedly backing Democratic nominees, has championed Chavez-DeRemer’s nomination. And it has given more progressive union leaders hope that, after winning the largest vote share from union households of any Republican in 40 years, Trump might change how his party treats the labor movement.

[Annie Lowrey: The rise of the union right]

“It’s a positive move for those of us who represent workers and who want workers to have a better life,” Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers and a close ally of Democratic Party leaders, told me. She noted that Chavez-DeRemer bucked her party not only by supporting the PRO Act but also by voting against private-school vouchers and cuts to public-education funding.

Trump courted union members throughout his campaign, seeing them as a key part of a blue-collar base that helped him flip states such as Michigan and Pennsylvania, which Joe Biden won in 2020. In September, his running mate, J. D. Vance, told reporters that the drop in private-sector union membership in recent decades was “a tragedy”—a statement sharply at odds with the GOP’s long-running advocacy of laws that would make unionizing harder, including in Vance’s home state of Ohio. O’Brien and congressional Republicans reportedly pushed for Trump to pick Chavez-DeRemer after the election. The decision may have been a reward for the Teamsters’ snub of Kamala Harris.

Yet until his selection of Chavez-DeRemer, Trump’s support for unions had stopped at rhetoric. He’s surrounded himself with conservative billionaires and generally sided with business interests by opposing minimum-wage increases, enhanced overtime pay, and other policies backed by organized labor. With that record in mind, Democrats have added qualifiers to their embrace of Chavez-DeRemer. “If Chavez-DeRemer commits as labor secretary to strengthen labor unions and promote worker power,” Warren said in her statement, “she’s a strong candidate for the job.”

That remains a big if. A spokesperson for the Trump transition, Aly Beley, told me that Chavez-DeRemer no longer supports the PRO Act—a major shift that will disappoint Democrats but might help her secure the GOP support she needs to win confirmation. “President Trump and his intended nominee for secretary of labor agree that the PRO Act is unworkable,” Beley said.

For the same reasons that Democrats like Chavez-DeRemer, conservatives are concerned and have pushed her to renounce her pro-union stances before Republicans agree to vote for her. “This is the one that stands out like a sore thumb,” Grover Norquist, the conservative activist and president of Americans for Tax Reform, told me of her nomination. Her support for the PRO Act, Norquist said, reflected “very bad judgment.” An anti-union group, the National Right to Work Committee, wrote in a letter to Trump before he announced Chavez-DeRemer’s nomination that she “should have no place” in his administration: “She would not be out of place in the Biden-Harris Department of Labor, which completely sold out to Big Labor from the start.”

In the Senate, Chavez-DeRemer’s nomination is not moving nearly as quickly as those of other Trump picks. The Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee (HELP), which oversees the Labor Department, has not scheduled her confirmation hearing. (Republicans have prioritized hearings for Trump’s national-security nominees.) And she hasn’t met with the committee’s chair, Republican Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, who issued a noncommittal statement after her nomination was announced. “I will need to get a better understanding of her support for Democrat legislation in Congress that would strip Louisiana’s ability to be a right to work state, and if that will be her position going forward,” Cassidy posted on X. Rand Paul, who also serves on the committee and is the leading sponsor of major anti-union legislation, has said little publicly about Chavez-DeRemer—and didn’t respond to a request for comment—but his chief strategist replied to the post, urging Cassidy to “stop her.” (Cassidy has been similarly lukewarm about another nominee within the committee’s jurisdiction: Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Trump’s pick for health and human services secretary.)

Chavez-DeRemer added her name to the PRO Act only a few months before last year’s election. Norquist speculated that she did so to appease unions in her district in the hopes of keeping her seat. If that was her strategy, it failed: Chavez-DeRemer lost to Democrat Janelle Bynum after one of the most expensive campaigns in the country.

Other Republicans see Chavez-DeRemer’s pro-labor stances as sincere, not strategic. A former colleague of hers, Representative Cliff Bentz of Oregon, praised her nomination and said that Trump had picked her for the Labor Department not in spite of her close ties to unions but because of them. “The fact that President-Elect Trump reached out to labor shows that he understands the need to create a better relationship between labor on the one hand and Republican folks on the other,” he told me. “And he saw in Lori exactly what he is trying to do.” Bentz said he would be surprised if Chavez-DeRemer “walks much of anything back.”

But Chavez-DeRemer wouldn’t be the first Trump Cabinet nominee to disavow a past position in order to win over Republican skeptics in the Senate. Tulsi Gabbard, the nominee for director of national intelligence, reversed her opposition to a key surveillance tool known as FISA Section 702, which was enacted after the September 11 terrorist attacks. And Kennedy is reportedly softening his long-standing attacks on vaccines in meetings with GOP senators.

[Read: America’s class politics have turned upside down]

If Chavez-DeRemer turns against the PRO Act, Democrats and unions will surely cool on her, but they won’t be shocked. Union leaders told me that they were under no illusions that Republicans would completely retract their hostility toward the labor movement, even if her nomination represented a move in that direction. “We have seen Project 2025,” Jody Calemine, the director of advocacy for the AFL-CIO, said. “That agenda is anti-worker to its very core.”

How much influence Chavez-DeRemer would have in an administration populated by corporate leaders is unclear. The PRO Act, for example, is unlikely to go anywhere in a Republican-controlled Congress even with a supportive labor secretary, and Norquist expects that the White House will exert tight control over policies enacted by Cabinet leaders, as it has during recent administrations of both parties.

To progressives, Chavez-DeRemer is clearly preferable to some of the other names Trump reportedly considered for labor secretary. Most notably, these include Andrew Puzder, the fast-food CEO whose nomination in 2017 collapsed amid ethical conflicts, revelations that he employed an undocumented immigrant as a housekeeper, and reports of labor-law violations at his company’s restaurants. She is also seen as friendlier to unions than either of Trump’s labor secretaries during his first term, Alexander Acosta and Eugene Scalia.

Chavez-DeRemer might be the best nominee Democrats can get under Trump. But labor leaders such as Weingarten will be watching closely to see how she squares her recent support for union-friendly legislation with an administration that is, in other key positions, empowering business leaders and billionaires. “This is where the rubber hits the road about whether the parties stay in their own preexisting camps” with regard to labor, Weingarten told me. She said she would lobby Democratic senators to support Chavez-DeRemer if the nominee sticks by her pro-union positions. But if she renounces them, Weingarten said, “then all bets are off.”

Let us now praise Donald Trump. It’s hard for me not to choke on that phrase. But it was his bluster—his demand that Hamas release its remaining hostages before his inauguration, or else “all hell will break out”—that effectively ushered in a cease-fire, the beginning of the end of the Gaza war.  

Although honesty requires crediting Trump, his success was not the product of magical powers or an indictment of Biden-administration diplomacy. Trump’s splenetic threats injected urgency into floundering talks. And by allowing his envoy Steven Witkoff to coordinate with the Biden administration, the incoming president left Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu with an acute sense of isolation.

Over the course of Netanyahu’s long reign, he has transformed his nation’s foreign policy. For much of its history, the Jewish state cultivated bipartisan support in the United States. Netanyahu trashed that tradition; for his own domestic purposes, he has provoked spats with Democratic presidents, bolstering his reputation among his right-wing base. At the same time, he tethered himself to the Republican Party.

As the Gaza war began to meander—and as it became clear that Israel would never achieve the “total victory” that he promised—Netanyahu dipped into this old playbook. In a video he released last June, he accused Biden of denying Israel the munitions that it needed to win the war. That charge was arguably slanderous, given the large sums of money that the United States had spent on arming Israel.

Although that strategy advanced his career, it had an obvious flaw. Because of Netanyahu’s lockstep partnership with the Republicans, he is beholden to the whims of the leader of that party. Once Trump emphatically expressed his desire to end the war, Netanyahu was stuck. To cross the incoming president would risk losing the most important pillar of Israel’s foreign support.

[Read: Trump made the Gaza cease-fire happen]

Some American observers assumed that Netanyahu wanted to extend the war into Trump’s term, during which he would have the Republican president’s permission to behave however he liked. These were, after all, like-minded politicians. But that assessment misread the Netanyahu-Trump dynamic.

Over the past four years, Netanyahu clearly has had reason to feel insecure about his relationship with Trump. Trump reportedly abhorred the fact that Netanyahu called Joe Biden to congratulate him on winning the 2020 presidential election. By acknowledging Biden’s victory, Netanyahu flunked the fundamental Trumpist loyalty test. (As Trump fumed about the episode to Axios’s Barak Ravid, he declared, “Fuck him.”) After October 7, Trump cast blame on the Israeli prime minister for failing to foresee the attack. Given this history, and all the anxieties it must surely provoke, Netanyahu was desperate to deliver for Trump, days before his inauguration, at the height of his prestige.

After months of diplomatic futility, Biden was shrewd to allow Trump and Witkoff to serve as the front men for the talks. Rather than clinging territorially to the office during his last days in power, or invoking clichés about how there’s one president at a time, he invited his successor into an ad hoc coalition in which they operated in sync, sharing the same strategy and applying combined pressure. This moment will be remembered as an atavistic flourish of bipartisan foreign policy, but it also makes me think about Antony Blinken’s eyes.

When I traveled with the secretary of state to the Middle East, and the lights of television cameras pointed at his face, I saw the toils of shuttle diplomacy in the bulging bags beneath his eyes. For months, protesters camped outside his suburban-Virginia house. They hurled red paint at his wife’s car while he kept returning to the region in the hopes of brokering a deal. Indeed, it was those months of excruciating, energetic negotiation that yielded the substance of an agreement, the gritty details of peace. That hard work should be at the center of the narrative, and maybe someday it will be, but right now it feels like a footnote.

On the left, plenty of Biden’s critics are now crowing. Many of those who hate “Genocide Joe” have always claimed that Trump would be better for the Palestinian cause, or perhaps just as bad, which justified a desire to punish Biden’s Zionism electorally. Now that strange faith in Trump will be tested, because the coming diplomacy will be even harder than ending the war. Hamas remains a fact of life in Gaza. For the time being, it’s the government there, and it has every incentive to remain an armed force. Reconstructing the Strip, rescuing it from dangerous anarchy, will require somehow navigating around that fact. I doubt that Trump cares deeply about the future of Gaza, or that he has the patience to maneuver through the tangle of complexities. But if he does, I will be the first to praise him.

Just after noon next Monday, Donald Trump will take an oath to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution, despite having, four years before, “engaged in an unprecedented criminal effort to overturn the legitimate results of the election in order to retain power.”

That is the conclusion of former Special Counsel Jack Smith’s investigation into Trump’s effort to interfere with the lawful transfer of power following the 2020 presidential election. Smith also found that Trump encouraged “violence against his perceived opponents” from Election Day 2020 to January 6, 2021, when a mob of Trump supporters stormed the Capitol, injuring more than 140 police officers.

The evidence amassed by Smith against Trump is overwhelming; any disinterested reader of the 137-page report will understand why Smith concluded that “but for Mr. Trump’s election and imminent return to the presidency … the admissible evidence was sufficient to obtain and sustain a conviction at trial.” (Justice Department policy prohibits the prosecution of sitting presidents.)

But the fact that the incoming president was indicted on charges that constitute the most serious attack by a chief executive against American democracy in our history may not be the most notable thing about this story. The most notable thing is that, already, more Americans seem to be discussing the Los Angeles fires, Babygirl, and Pete Hegseth’s nomination to be secretary of defense than Smith’s report. Within a matter of days, the report, which very few people will read, will be more or less forgotten.

[Read: Trump’s sentencing made no one happy]

I understand why. The central role Trump played in the effort to violently overturn the election has been known for four years, so the core findings of the special counsel’s report are hardly news. In addition, much of the public has been worn down by the relentless intensity of the Trump era. MAGA world may draw energy and meaning from incessant conflict; the rest of us do not. After a particularly crude and ugly campaign, most people want to take a break from politics, including those whose vocation is politics.

Nor are most Americans, including fierce Trump critics, particularly interested in relitigating the past. Trump was a known commodity to voters; his maliciousness and corrupt character were on display virtually every day. And yet, Trump won the popular vote—the first Republican to do so in two decades—and he easily won the Electoral College. Trump’s ethic represents the American ethic, at least for now.

It will be impossible for Americans to escape Trump over the next four years, but few of us want him to occupy more mental and emotional space than necessary. And to the degree that we do focus on him, it should be more on what he does and less on what he’s done. In the meantime, there are countless things worthy of our attention and our affections, things that are beautiful and fun and edifying.

[Read: The cases against Trump: a guide]

“How small, of all that human hearts endure,” Samuel Johnson wrote, “That part which laws or kings can cause or cure. / Still to ourselves in every place consign’d, / Our own felicity we make or find.”

And still. Politics matters “because of its capacity, when benign, to allow all around it to flourish, and its capacity, when malignant, to make all around it wither,” the columnist Charles Krauthammer wrote. He added that “the task of merely maintaining strong and sturdy the structures of a constitutional order is unending, the continuing and ceaseless work of every generation.”

What Jack Smith’s report shows, for those who have eyes to see and ears to hear, is that the structures of our constitutional order were under assault by a man who is about to become president for a second time. A convicted felon, Trump called the attack on the Capitol “a day of love.” He leveraged the attack to his political advantage. He said that those in Congress who’d investigated his crimes should “go to jail.” He has promised to pardon rioters—calling them “hostages” and “unbelievable patriots”—within the first hour of his second term. And very few people seem to care anymore. Since his victory two months ago, we are witnessing an almost across-the-board capitulation to Trump, in one institution after another. Broken people approach the throne on bended knee.

[Read: The GOP completes its surrender]

In his 1993 essay, “Defining Deviancy Down,” Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan warned about the tendency of societies to respond to destructive and aberrant behavior by lowering their standards. Crimes that at one time would have shocked the nation were barely noticed at another. “We are,” Moynihan wrote, “getting used to a lot of behavior that is not good for us.”

That includes returning to power a president who “resorted to a series of criminal efforts to retain power,” in the words of the special counsel’s report. The fact that Americans are bored by this is a sign of weariness. But beware: Indifference to truth and honor and the rule of law has a way of catching up with a country.

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Today, after 15 months of brutal war, Israel and Hamas agreed to a deal to secure the release of Israeli hostages and the cessation of hostilities in Gaza. The agreement’s first six weeks will see Israel withdraw from much of the enclave and release hundreds of Palestinian prisoners, including convicted mass murderers, in exchange for Hamas releasing 33 captive Israelis—some living, some dead. Should everything proceed according to plan, subsequent negotiations would assure the release of the remaining Israeli hostages and the reconstruction of Gaza in the deal’s second and third stages.

Given the precarious nature of the deal’s phased structure, the matter is far from settled, despite the headlines and handshakes. The accord must also still be ratified by the Israeli cabinet. If that happens, the ensuing weeks will be traumatic, as returning Gazan refugees discover whether their homes are still standing, and the families of Israel’s hostages discover whether their loved ones are still alive.

The tentative agreement is nonetheless a victory for the foreign-policy teams of Presidents Joe Biden and Donald Trump, who worked in tandem with regional partners Qatar and Egypt to bring it about. The terms largely echo a proposal laid out by Biden himself in May 2024, but the incoming president dragged the parties over the finish line. What changed was not Washington’s general orientation toward the conflict. Far from turning up the heat on Israel, Trump telegraphed a further embrace of its positions during his 2024 campaign, repeatedly attacking Biden for restricting arms sales to Israel. But this posture may have helped deliver both sides: Hamas could reasonably surmise that it would not get a better deal during Trump’s presidency, while Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s hard-right government likely acceded to the arrangement in order to stay in the new leader’s good graces as he assumed office.

[Eliot A. Cohen: Cancel the foreign-policy apocalypse]

The Israeli far right, whose lawmakers hold the margin of power in Netanyahu’s coalition, had previously threatened to collapse the government should a deal be reached without Hamas fully vanquished from Gaza. But amid Trump’s return, the radicals have their eyes on bigger prizes, such as the annexation of the West Bank—which the Palestinians claim for their future state—and are loath to forgo such opportunities. For this reason, they will likely vote against the cease-fire but leave Netanyahu in power, allowing him to enact it.

Put another way, it’s not that Trump had a stick with which to beat Israel that Biden didn’t have; it’s that his presidency holds out the prospect of carrots that Biden would never offer. It was less the president-elect’s pressure than his potential promise that brought the Israeli far right onside. With Trump, everything is a transaction, and for his would-be suitors—not just Israel, but also Hamas’s sponsors in Qatar—the Gaza cease-fire is a down payment.

[Samer Sinijlawi: My hope for Palestine]

On the Palestinian side, the deal marks a momentary if Pyrrhic triumph for an eviscerated Hamas, which will get to claim that it outlasted the Israeli army and parade some of the released prisoners through the streets of Gaza. But with its leaders killed and its territory devastated, the group will have little to celebrate or to show for its atrocities on October 7. The terrorist organization may continue to impose its will by force, but it is deeply unpopular in its own backyard, according to recent polls.

Meanwhile, with Hamas chief Yahya Sinwar dead, Lebanon’s Hezbollah decimated, Syria’s pro-Iran regime overthrown, and Iran’s so-called Axis of Resistance shattered, Netanyahu has a plausible claim to victory, should the deal hold. And if it doesn’t, or should Hamas prove insufficiently forthcoming in negotiations over the remaining hostages, he has a new American president in office who may happily underwrite a return to hostilities.

The guns might mercifully fall silent for now, but if history is any indication, the long war between Israel and Hamas will continue, in one form or another.

Canadian leaders pledged to pursue a 'strong' response if slapped with the 25-percent tariffs Trump has threatened.

Talking tough about China has been a hallmark of Donald Trump’s political career. But now, with his second administration only days away, he appears to be prioritizing Big Business’s interests in his China policy—even to the possible detriment of U.S. national security.

These are early days, of course, and Trump’s position is subject to change. But the very nature of his political coalition looks likely to prevent him from taking a hard-line approach toward China. The corporate titans in his camp—most of all, Tesla founder Elon Musk—have major financial interests in China. They could try to use their influence to restrain Trump and the China hawks on his team, such as his choice for secretary of state, Marco Rubio, from actions that might threaten those investments.

Striking the right balance between security and business is admittedly tricky. Left to themselves, many American CEOs would likely sell equipment and technology to China, or make investments in Chinese firms, that could help Beijing upgrade its military capabilities and high-tech industries. In trying to prevent this, Washington could wind up depriving U.S. companies of innocuous opportunities in the world’s second-largest economy. President Joe Biden attempted to resolve this dilemma by putting some restrictions on American companies’ interactions and investments in China, but specifically targeting the technologies that are most vital to U.S. security, such as advanced chips and artificial intelligence.

Key Republicans around Trump seem to believe that these curbs went too far. Last month, amid the late scramble to avert a government shutdown, House Republicans dropped a provision from the spending bill that aimed to toughen restrictions on U.S. investment in China. Jim McGovern, a Democratic representative, asserted that Musk used his influence to scuttle the original budget deal in order to get that China provision excised. Musk “got what he wanted,” McGovern posted on X. “The ability to sell out the U.S. so he could make money in China.” Whether or not that was Musk’s intent—he criticized the House for spending too much—the provision’s removal cleared a potential hurdle for U.S. companies that want to expand their investments in China.

That decision is part of a pattern. A week later, Trump asked the Supreme Court to stop the impending ban on the Chinese-owned social-media platform TikTok. Congress had passed a law mandating the ban in 2024, out of concern that the Chinese government could pressure the app’s Beijing-based parent company, ByteDance, to cough up the data it collects about American citizens. The law gave ByteDance a chance to save TikTok by divesting its stake in the app, but that never happened. As president in 2020, Trump similarly sought to ban TikTok or force ByteDance to sell the app’s U.S. business. Now Trump’s legal team suggests that shutting down TikTok would infringe on free speech.

[Read: Has Trump gone soft on China?]

But the flip-flop may be motivated by a less idealistic purpose. Perhaps Trump now sees TikTok as a valuable tool for self-promotion. More ominous, Trump’s TikTok turnaround (at least in public) happened to coincide with a meeting he had with a billionaire donor early last year: Jeff Yass is the co-founder of a financial firm, Susquehanna International Group, that is a shareholder in ByteDance and stands to lose from a TikTok ban. Trump has said that the two men didn’t discuss the company.

Democratic Representative Raja Krishnamoorthi, a co-author of the TikTok bill, suggested to me that he does not think such concerns are unrelated to Trump’s change of heart. “My Republican colleagues tell me it’s because of one or two donors on his side who have basically tried to persuade him to undo the law,” Krishnamoorthi said. But he noted that the only way Trump can unwind the legislation is to “come back to Congress,” where the law was approved with bipartisan support.

Trump appears to be watering down his plan for tariffs on China as well. During the presidential campaign, he pledged to impose duties of 50 percent on Chinese imports. Shortly after the election in November, he changed that to 10 percent, presumably on top of existing tariffs. This reduction (if it is indeed Trump’s final plan) would benefit the American economy. The extremely high duty Trump originally proposed would have wreaked havoc on supply chains and raised prices on everyday necessities for American households, given how many of these the United States still imports from China. And if Trump slaps higher tariffs on other countries that produce low-cost imports—say, Mexico—he may actually help China, because U.S. companies will choose to keep their manufacturing there instead.

Chinese leaders have been trying to woo wary American investors back into Beijing’s struggling economy, and they would surely welcome a softer stance from Washington. For his part, Trump seems to believe that he can work with Chinese leader Xi Jinping. He even invited Xi to his inauguration (Xi is not expected to attend but may send a high-level envoy to represent him). Earlier this month, Trump said that the two are already communicating through their aides (China’s Foreign Ministry did not confirm this).

Trump’s apparent softening puts U.S. interests at risk. Relations between the United States and China have deteriorated since Trump left the White House in 2021; Xi has become even more hostile toward Washington, and he is unlikely to waver from economic, security, and foreign policies designed to counter American global power. Among these are enormous government subsidies to Chinese industry and efforts to undermine the current world order. In a speech published in a recent issue of the Chinese Communist Party’s top ideological journal, Xi expressed his contempt for the West in especially harsh terms: “Many Western countries find themselves increasingly in difficulty, largely because they cannot curb the greedy nature of capital or address the deep-rooted maladies of materialism and spiritual emptiness,” Xi said.

The timing of the speech’s publication—two years after Xi delivered it and three weeks before Trump’s inauguration—could be a warning to the incoming president. Xi may be more implacable and willing to retaliate against Trump this time around. “History has repeatedly proven that striving for security through struggle brings genuine security, while seeking security through weakness and concession ultimately leads to insecurity,” he said in the speech.

American tycoons, including Musk, could become Xi’s targets. When Trump imposed tariffs on China during his first administration, Beijing generally limited its response to tit-for-tat duties and curbs on U.S. imports. Now the Chinese government is signaling that it could go after American companies more aggressively. In December, Chinese authorities launched an antitrust probe into the U.S. AI chip giant Nvidia. Three months earlier, China’s Commerce Ministry threatened to bar PVH, which owns the Calvin Klein and Tommy Hilfiger brands, from doing business in the country. The American apparel firm had offended Beijing by abiding by a U.S. regulation—one that prohibits importing cotton from the Xinjiang region, where China is alleged to be using forced labor.

[Read: The global outrage machine skips the Uyghurs]

Tesla could easily be next. Musk and other business leaders know this and may see it as a reason to press Trump to go easy on China. But what’s good for profits could be bad for national security and undermine America’s technological advantage. An incoming U.S. president who puts his rich backers above the national interest would surely prove Xi correct about American greed causing American decline.

US Senator Marco Rubio says, under Donald Trump, the State Department's top priority 'will be the United States'.