President Biden plans to put the deadly assault on the Capitol at the center of his re-election campaign in the same way he portrayed the white nationalist rally in Charlottesville during the 2020 campaign: as a Trump-inspired threat to democracy, Axios' Alex Thompson reports.

• Why it matters: Biden's renewed focus on Jan. 6 is his campaign's latest acknowledgment that it expects former President Trump to be the GOP nominee amid his raft of court cases.

📺 The campaign says it plans ads built around two Biden events over the next week that will invoke the Capitol riot.

• Biden campaign manager Julie Chávez Rodríguez told reporters on a call previewing the speeches: "We are running a campaign like the fate of our democracy depends on it — because it does."

1. In a speech tomorrow at Valley Forge, Pa., Biden will make clear that reminders of the Capitol riot — and Trump's push to overturn the 2020 election — will be major campaign themes.

• Senior campaign officials say the venue is apt: It's where George Washington's army endured a frigid winter in 1777-1778 before uniting his troops and fighting for democracy and freedom against the British. Biden will try to rally his party for a fight against "MAGA extremism."
• The speech was scheduled for Saturday, Jan. 6, but was moved up a day because of a threat of bad weather.

2. Biden will speak again about the Jan. 6 riot on Monday at the Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, S.C. — a Black church where a white supremacist murdered nine people in 2015.

🥊 The other side: Trump also has played up Jan. 6. on the trail, calling it a beautiful day and describing those imprisoned for the insurrection as "great, great patriots" and "hostages."

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America's spending on new factories is surging, Emily Peck reports for Axios Markets.

• Why it matters: President Biden's signature legislation — particularly the CHIPs Act and Bipartisan Infrastructure Law — has spurred a "supercycle" of construction spending that's buoying the economy.

🧮 By the numbers: Manufacturing-related construction hit a $210 billion annual rate in November, more than triple the average rate in the 2010s, according to new census data.

• All that spending is driving an increase in construction hiring. Job openings in construction increased by 43,000 last month, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data out yesterday — and are up by 111,000 from last year.
• Contractors are even facing labor shortages in areas with industrial mega projects, Anirban Basu, the chief economist of the Associated Builders and Contractors, said yesterday.

🕶️ What to watch: The surge in construction will eventually translate into a surge in hiring for manufacturing jobs, said Aaron Sojourner, a senior researcher at the W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research.

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Laudable goals like achieving "equity" and "diversity" and making people feel "included" have become weaponized terms, Axios' prolific Emily Peck reports.

Why it matters: The year ahead will be pivotal for corporate diversity efforts, as attacks against DEI — diversity, equity and inclusion — will likely intensify.

• But for many employers, maintaining a diverse workforce where employees feel included is a key part of attracting and retaining workers.

💨 Catch up fast: It's been a long, strange trip for corporate diversity efforts — which can range from employee resource groups to anti-bias training to hiring programs.

• For years, DEI was criticized as corporate window dressing or for being counterproductive. More recently, conservative politicians and pundits have made DEI a target, with new laws limiting its practice cropping up in Florida and Texas.
• DEI funding and staffing stalled last year after a two-year boom in the wake of the protests that followed the murder of George Floyd in 2020.

🔭 Zoom out: The Supreme Court's decision last year overturning the use of affirmative action in universities has drawn attention to corporate diversity efforts.

• Businesses are trying to avoid any programs that could draw legal scrutiny: Goals around hiring particular demographic groups are increasingly frowned upon.

"Anything that smacks of a quota" is out, said Diana Scott, Human Capital Center Leader at The Conference Board.

• At the same time, many business leaders say they're still committed to diversity. In a survey of chief human resource officers recently conducted by The Conference Board, zero respondents said they were planning to scale back DEI in 2024.

State of play: This all means that the way DEI happens inside companies is changing.

• Some firms, including Blackstone, are focusing on hiring for socioeconomic diversity, and on changing job requirements to find more diverse talent without targeting race or ethnicity, Fortune reports.
• And businesses are pulling back from the DEI term. The focus is on moving away from "those three words" towards "well-being and inclusion," said Scott, the Conference Board official.

🔮 What's next: "Companies are really starting to look at other ways to do the work without saying that they're doing the work," said Cinnamon Clark, cofounder of Goodwork Sustainability, a DEI consulting firm.

• Businesses likely will be talking more about "employee experience" or "wellness," which falls under the inclusion bucket, said Clark.

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Microsoft is so confident AI is the future of computing that it's adding a new button to the keyboards of Windows PCs dedicated to its Copilot AI assistant, Axios' Ina Fried reports.

• New machines will be unveiled at the CES tech show in Vegas next week.

Why it matters: It's the first change to the Windows keyboard in 30 years, and the latest example of hardware makers betting on AI to both create new product categories and breathe life into older ones.

💭 "We definitely think this is the year of the AI PC," Microsoft executive VP Yusuf Mehdi told Axios. "We think this is the next fundamental change with how people will interact with their computers."

• While tens of millions of people are already using the Windows Copilot, Mehdi says the addition of a dedicated key shows Microsoft sees "it now becoming mainstream and valuable enough and easy enough for a much broader set of the population."
• Mehdi says that though 2024 will also see a wide array of other AI-specific hardware, the PC has a unique role since it's where users create so much content, from music to screenplays to images.

🔬 Zoom in: The Copilot key will be located to the right of the space bar, replacing a menu button.

• The first PCs with the dedicated key will be announced at CES, with more coming by the spring from Microsoft and other PC brands. By year's end, the Copilot key should be ubiquitous on new PCs.

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In a new campaign ad that doubles as a confessional, former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie tells voters he has "an admission to make," Axios' Alex Thompson scoops.

• "Eight years ago when I decided to endorse Donald Trump for president, I did it because he was winning, and I did it because I thought I could make him a better candidate and a better president," Christie says, speaking directly to the camera for the entire ad. "I was wrong. I made a mistake."

Why it matters: Christie, alone among the top GOP presidential candidates in persistently walloping Trump, is trying to win over voters who backed the former president in the past but now are wary or disillusioned.

🔎 Behind the scenes: Christie's team says it's targeting ads this week to areas where rival Nikki Haley is hosting town halls.

• The new digital ad is part of a previously announced seven-figure ad buy ahead of the New Hampshire primary on Jan. 23.

Watch the ad.

Long-awaited court filings from a lawsuit related to Jeffrey Epstein's sex trafficking conspiracy case were unsealed last evening, Axios' Rebecca Falconer, Sareen Habeshian, April Rubin and Shauneen Miranda report.

• The documents feature roughly 150 people mentioned in previously redacted parts of the suit against Ghislaine Maxwell, who was sentenced last year to 20 years in prison on sex trafficking and other charges for helping Epstein sexually abuse teenage girls.

Former President Clinton is mentioned more than 50 times in the filings.

• But records don't indicate any evidence of illegality on Clinton's part, and his representatives said they didn't object to the unsealing.

Keep reading ... Key names revealed ... See the documents: 943 pages.

The falling-block video game Tetris, which turns 40 this year, met its match in 13-year-old Willis Gibson of Stillwater, Okla. — the first player to officially "beat" the original Nintendo version of the game, AP reports.

• Willis ("blue scuti" in the gaming world) made it to what gamers call a "kill screen" — a point where the Tetris code glitches, crashing the game.

Willis managed on Dec. 21 to trigger a kill screen on Level 157, which the gaming world takes as victory over the game.

• Tetris CEO Maya Rogers said: "Congratulations to 'blue scuti' for achieving this extraordinary accomplishment, a feat that defies all preconceived limits of this legendary game."

Keep reading.

Out this morning ... Keeper cover of The Economist features a vintage, well-worn sedan next to a waving President Biden: "MADE IN '42 ... ROADWORTHY IN '24?"