Amid his ongoing spat with Fox News, which he says has been insufficiently slavish in its support for him, Donald Trump is now promoting Newsmax on Twitter.

It follows his earlier OAN viewing session.

Newsmax is hitting all the right notes as far as the president is concerned, backing his decision to pardon Michael Flynn and talking up his false claims of election fraud.

Donald Trump has raged at Twitter after the platform suspended a personal account belonging to a Pennsylvania state senator who presided over a conspiracy-filled “hearing” among GOP lawmakers to amplify false claims of voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election.

The president – in a series of posts tagging One America News Network, which was suspended from YouTube this week for promoting a false Covid-19 “cure” amid its wall-to-wall far-right content – said state Senator Doug Mastriano was “banned” after the platform and “fake news, working together” sought to “SILENCE THE TRUTH.”

In a change from his previous habit of live-tweeting Fox News broadcasts, Donald Trump has switched to faux-news channel OAN.

The tweet first is classic Trump – a ratings war – mixed with with some now-standard election conspiracy nonsense.

Another makes a separate outlandish conspiracy claim about USB drives “giving” votes to Joe Biden.

A non-OAN tweet from the president claims that Doug Mastriano, a Pennsylvania state senator, was banned from Twitter. Mr Mastriano’s account does not appear to be blocked at the moment, but he has tweeted an image suggesting it was temporarily suspended for breaking the platform’s rules.

Mr Mastriano was among the Republican politicians who took part in the not-a-hearing into Mr Trump’s/Rudy Giuliani’s false claims of election malfeasance at a hotel this week.

Donald Trump snapped at his own golf course on Thanksgiving, and exclaimed that he hated “this f*****g hole’, as he played before having dinner, writes Gino Spocchia.  

The outburst came as the US president paid a visit to Trump National Golf Club in Potomac Falls, Virginia, where he spent Thursday morning.

America could face its “darkest days” in modern medical history if the coronavirus crisis is not brought under control, a top medic has warned.

Dr Varon Joseph, chief of staff at Houston’s United Memorial Center, said a surge of infections over the Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays may push hospitals to breaking point, writes Matt Mathers.

His comments came as US health officials on Wednesday reported 180,830 new coronavirus cases nationwide – a rise of 2,630 from the previous 24 hours, New York Times data shows.

Democrats once dominated Koochiching County in the blue-collar Iron Range of northern Minnesota But in this month’s presidential election, President Donald Trump won it with 60% of the vote.

That’s not because voters there are suddenly shifting to the right, said Tom Bakk, who represents the area in the state Senate. It’s because, he said, Democrats have steadily moved too far to the left for many rural voters.

“We’ve got to see if we can get the Democratic Party to moderate and accept the fact that rural Minnesota is not getting more conservative,” said Bakk, who announced last week that he would become an independent after serving 25 years as a Democrat. “It’s that you guys are leaving them behind.”

So far, it’s just a retweet of his campaign account trailing the first distribution of coronavirus vaccines…

Despite Donald Trump’s arguments to the contrary, his time in the Oval Office is coming to a close.  

Though his time in office has been anything but traditional, the president will almost certainly take advantage of one outgoing presidential tradition; issuing a slew of pardons, writes Graig Graziosi.  

Two sentences from the political scientist Michael Robinson stand out as America tries to surge out of the coronavirus crisis: The US economy is the ultimate disproof of the computer programmer’s maxim that if you put garbage in, you get garbage out. Americans make garbage policy all the time, Robinson told a senior seminar I attended during college in 1982, but the US economy is almost always OK.

We’re about to find out if Robinson was right, writes Tim Mullaney.