Trump Sworn in as America’s 47th President

In a ceremony inside the Capital Rotunda building on Monday, Donald Trump was sworn in as the second president in U.S. history to serve two non-consecutive terms—completing the most unlikely political comeback of our time. His inauguration speech promised that although “the pillars of our society lay broken and seemingly in complete disrepair,” “from this moment on, America's decline is over.”

“We now have a government that cannot manage even a simple crisis at home, while at the same time stumbling into a continuing catalog of catastrophic events abroad,” he said as former President Biden looked on.

“The golden age of America begins right now,” the President declared to a standing ovation, while reminding those listening that things could have gone differently on that fateful day of July 13 in Butler County, Pennsylvania. “I felt then and believe, even more so now, that my life was saved for a reason. I was saved by God to make America great again.”

Trump’s First Days in Office: “Shock and Awe”

Before the inauguration, President Trump’s team had promised the public a blitz of executive orders and action aimed at fulfilling the President’s campaign promises and bringing a “ revolution of common sense” to Washington. Any one of these actions in and of itself would be newsworthy, and taken as a whole, the effect is enormous. (By comparison, in 2017 President Trump signed one executive order the day of his inauguration.)

• A State of Emergency has been declared at the border, allowing the military to assist with defending the border against what the president has called an “invasion” of illegal immigrants. The Department of Defense has sent 1,500 troops down to the border to augment troops already conducting enforcement operations, including 500 troops of marines.
• Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has begun conducting raids across the country, arresting and deporting illegal immigrants, beginning with those who have committed violent crimes. Fox News reporter Bill Melugin embedded with ICE in Boston and witnessed eight of first arrests of illegals: multiple MS-13 gang members, Interpol Red Notices, murder and rape suspects, and a volatile Haitian gang member with 18 convictions in recent years. ICE won’t stop there: deportation is popular—according to a recent ABC News poll, 56% of Americans support deporting all illegal immigrants, compared with 38% in 2016.
• DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) programs across the government have been terminated, notably rescinding a 1965 Executive Order from Lyndon Johnson that began affirmative action in the government. Additionally, the U.S. Government now officially recognizes only two genders: male and female.
• All foreign aid has been frozen for the next 90 days, as the new administration rolls out its priorities and President Trump has his administration picks confirmed by the Senate (more on that below).
• President Trump has granted clemency to the nearly 1,600 people who faced prosecution for their involvement in the breaching of the Capitol on January 6, 2021, putting an end to what the New York Times called the “most complex investigation in U.S. history.”
• A freeze has been placed on cases from the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice.
• The U.S. has withdrawn from the Paris Climate Accord and the World Health Organization.
• An executive order has been signed to effectively force clarity on the issue of “birthright citizenship” provided by the Fourteenth Amendment, which has thus far been accepted to broadly mean that anyone born in the United States, regardless of the legal status of the parents, automatically has US citizenship. (As it is interpreted now, if a baby was born in the US on a flight layover, that baby would be a US citizen.) According to a summary of the executive order by the BBC, “Trump's order seeks to change the rules to deny the granting of citizenship to the children of migrants who are either in the US illegally or on temporary visas. It applies to children born on 19 February and onwards, and does not apply retroactively.” This executive order has now been paused by a federal judge on questions of constitutionality and will be adjudicated through the legal system. Read more here.
• Trump has visited North Carolina and California to meet with leaders and review damage done by last year’s hurricane in North Carolina and the fires in California, and to put together a plan to provide federal funding to the cleanup and rebuilding effort. In California, to date, 57,174 acres have burned and 16,240 structures have been destroyed. The latest damage estimate is from AcuWeather, and puts the total loss between $250 billion and $275 billion.
• Over a dozen inspectors general have been fired at agencies ranging from the Defense Department, State Department, Energy Department, Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), etc. The President is supposed to provide 30 days’ notice to Congress before removing an IG, and Congress said this notice has not been given. It’s unclear whether or not there will be repercussions from the President making this move.
• Communication blackouts have been ordered for government health agencies, banning those agencies from publishing external communications such as advisories and reports, as Trump puts his team into place.
• Government security clearances have been revoked for the 50 intelligence agents who signed a letter categorizing Hunter Biden’s infamous laptop as a Russian PSYOP. The laptop had evidence of not only Hunter’s degenerate lifestyle, but of his corrupt business deals selling the influence of the Biden name around the world. (See more about the Biden business deals below.) Security clearances have also been terminated for John Bolton, who was fired as Trump’s national security adviser during his first term and who later wrote a book whose publication the White House unsuccessfully sought to block on grounds that it disclosed national security information.
• In a separate move, government-funded security protections have been stripped from Dr. Anthony Fauci, Mike Pompeo, John Bolton, and Brian Hook. Pompeo infamously sabotaged Trump’s first term by denying security clearances to National Security Council appointees, setting up Trump to be sabotaged by remaining members of the NSC not aligned with the president’s foreign policy objectives. Alexander Vindman, from his position on the NSC, leaked a version of Trump’s infamous phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, leading to President Trump’s first impeachment.
• President Trump ordered all the assassination records related to John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. to be released.
• Ross Ulbricht, creator of the dark web site Silk Road and crypto/libertarian folk hero has been pardoned. While contraband (including murder for hire) was sold on the site, Ross’s supporters have argued that he never sold the contraband himself and that his prosecution was unfairly and unethically conducted.
• Trump signed an executive order delaying the enforcement of a federal ban on TikTok for 75 days.
• Denali has been returned to its original name of Mount McKinley, [and](https://www.doi.gov/pressreleases/interior-department-advances-restoration-historic-names-honoring-american-greatness#:~:text=As directed by the President,bear the name Mount McKinley.) the Gulf of Mexico has been renamed the Gulf of America.
• Trump is in discussions with Denmark, seeking to buy Greenland, currently an autonomous territory within the Kingdom of Denmark.
• Newly confirmed Secretary of State Marco Rubio has gone to Panama amid discussions of retaking control of the Panama Canal, given to Panama by President Jimmy Carter under the Torrijos-Carter Treaties in 1977.

To top it all off, the president has done all this while heavily engaging with the media (around 15 times since his swearing in) in formal press conferences, gaggles, or speeches where he took questions from the press.

He begins his presidency with a 56% approval rating, his highest approval rating on record, and a rating that is the same across all racial demographics.

7 Israeli Hostages Come Home

As part of the first phase of a three-phase 6-week ceasefire agreement between Israel and Hamas, three hostages were released last Sunday, and four more came home yesterday. Hours later, Israel released 200 Palestinians from prison. The remainder of phase one of the ceasefire calls for Hamas to release 26 more hostages at intervals over the 6-week period. Israel will release about 1,700 more prisoners, while keeping their forces in Gaza's border areas, including the southern Philadelphi Corridor, excluding the Netzarim Corridor, a military zone cutting off the north of Gaza. Israeli forces will leave populated areas inside Gaza, displaced Palestinian civilians will be allowed to return to their neighborhoods, and hundreds of aid trucks will be allowed into Gaza each day.

Read more about the ceasefire here.

Biden Runs up the Count on Presidential Pardons

In his final days, President Biden preemptively pardoned a slew of current and former government officials and lawmakers to ensure the recipients are never federally prosecuted for whatever federal offenses they may have committed during their times in the halls of power: Dr. Anthony Fauci, General Mark Milley, and members of the House committee that investigated the January 6th attack on the Capitol. Considering that Fauci swore under oath that the NIH “has not ever and does not now fund gain-of-function research in the Wuhan Institute of Virology,” Milley reportedly told the Chinese he’d tip them off if the president ordered a strike, and Rep. Liz Cheney allegedly made unethical contact with a key January 6th Committee witness without an attorney’s knowledge, the move by the Biden administration was billed as a guard against potential “revenge” by President Trump.

Then on the day of the inauguration, after President Biden was already seated on the dais, 15 minutes before Trump was to be sworn in, the White House announced that five of Biden’s family members had been preemptively pardoned: his brother James B. Biden and his wife Sara Jones Biden; his sister, Valerie Biden Owens and her husband John T. Owens; and his brother, Francis W. Biden. None had been prosecuted for a crime, although critics have alleged that they served, like Hunter, as bagmen for the Joe Biden family.

Nearly all of these preemptive pardons reach back to the beginning of 2014.

“It's disgusting,” Bill Daley — a longtime Biden friend who was White House chief of staff under President Obama — told Axios. It “confirms that there are serious concerns about culpability.” Ex-Obama strategist David Axelrod slammed the pardons as “egregious,” and constitutional scholar Jonathan Turley wrote that “influence-peddling has always been the favorite form of corruption in Washington, but this city has never seen the likes of the Biden family.”

*Watch as, in 2020, CNN’s Jake Tapper asks President Biden about preemptive pardons. (Spoiler alert: the answer is exactly the opposite of what he did four years later.)*

President Biden leaves office having pardoned more people than any other president.

Other News

Cabinet confirmations: The Senate has confirmed former Senator Marco Rubio for Secretary of State, John Ratcliffe as CIA director, Pete Hegseth as Secretary of Defense, and former Governor Kristi Noem to lead the Department of Homeland Security. Hearings for RFK Jr., Tulsi Gabbard and Kash Patel will begin soon, and are expected to be contentious.

Trump vows to sanction Putin if he won’t come to the negotiating table to end the war in Ukraine. A call between the two world leaders will likely take place in the coming days.

Egg prices spike amid the rise of bird flu. The Biden administration has provided around $2 billion in funds mostly to the federal Agricultural Department to help fight the disease in animals, as it is highly contagious and lethal to chickens, and has spread to cattle. The CDC reports that the risk to the general public is low, since the primary way for an individual to contract it is directly from an infected animal.

$TRUMP meme coin: Trump tested new limits by launching a surprise meme coin that vaulted him to crypto billionaire status two days before being inaugurated. A $MELANIA meme coin was launched shortly thereafter. Unlike traditional cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin or Ethereum, which have underlying technology or utility (e.g., blockchain for secure transactions or smart contracts), meme coins generally lack intrinsic value or utility. They are not designed with a specific purpose beyond trading or community engagement.

Stargate announced: OpenAI, SoftBank, Oracle, and other partners made an investment pledge, forming a joint venture called Stargate, which will build artificial-intelligence infrastructure in the US. Under the plan, up to half a trillion dollars would be invested over the next four years, with $100 billion deployed immediately. The deal is massive even by Silicon Valley standards and underscores the extent to which tech companies and government officials are betting on AI—and how much tech executives want to broadcast their enthusiasm at the start of the new administration. The government is not putting up money in the deal. Elon Musk created palace intrigue headlines by throwing shade on the investment, saying of those making the investment pledge, “They don’t actually have the money,” referring to funds beyond the $90 billion verified for the investment.

Speaking of Elon Musk, the media has launched a new conspiracy: we’ll call it Salutegate. Speaking at a celebratory rally for Trump's inauguration at Capital One Arena in Washington, D.C., Musk twice made a gesture that involved slapping his hand on his chest and then extending his arm straight out at an upward angle, palm facing down. He repeated this gesture, saying, "My heart goes out to you.” The media, always good for a Nazi comparison if it involves Trump or someone near him, lurched into gear. “It looked a lot like the salute used in Nazi Germany and fascist Italy,” The New York Times opined. “That was a Nazi salute,” Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a history professor at New York University who studies fascism, said on X, “and a very belligerent one too.” “That salute was evocative of things we’ve seen through history,” CNN host Kasie Hunt said. Musk dismissed the allegations as "dirty tricks" by his critics. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu defended Musk, saying that he was being “falsely smeared” and is “a great friend of Israel.”

CNN has axed 200 jobs, highlighting the extreme challenges left-of-center and liberal media is facing post-Trump election. Now having cut 6% of its cable-side production staff and relegated Jim Acosta to the graveyard shift of midnight to 2 A.M. EST, CNN is turning its focus to digital distribution, subscriptions, streaming, etc. (The reader can decide if this news is related to the story just above...)__

BBC: South African president signs controversial land seizure law: South African President Cyril Ramaphosa has signed into law a bill allowing land seizures by the government without compensation. It replaces the pre-democratic Expropriation Act of 1975, which placed an obligation on the State to pay owners it wanted to take land from, under the principle of “willing seller, willing buyer.” The new law allows for expropriation without compensation only in circumstances where it is “just and equitable and in the public interest” to do so. The president's spokesperson Vincent Magwenya said that, under the law, the State “may not expropriate property arbitrarily or for a purpose other than... in the public interest.” But that begs the question. How do we know that what is in “the public interest” will not be determined arbitrarily?