Donald Trump's Washington will be the epicenter of America's most powerful pillars: governance, business and media, Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen write in a "Behind the Curtain" column.

• Both left and right will be consumed at scale with Trump in the information wars.
• Republicans plan an epic burst of legislating and power-stretching.
• The biggest industries — AI, energy, financial services (crypto included) and defense — are expected to benefit big-time with lighter regs and lower taxes.

Why it matters: Washington faces a possible reordering of government, business and media power, all at once.

💡 What's new: Axios is launching a new offering — AM Executive Briefings — to help you navigate the new Washington.

• Members will get blunt insights and analysis from Jim and Mike, joined by our roster of unrivaled subject matter experts. This'll be a live take on our "Behind the Curtain" columns.
• In the 30 years we've both been covering Washington, this is something we've never done before. It'll be fun for us — and illuminating and useful for you.

🧠 First up: Members will be able to join monthly webinars where we'll dissect the news and trending events, and share behind-the-scenes dynamics. Recordings will be available if you can't join live.

• Follow-up reports will be your indispensable guides to the new administration: the policy agenda, the tax fight, AI, energy, health care, President-elect Trump's thought process, and winners and losers in the world ahead.

Become a member here.

• 🎤 If you're interested in in-person briefings for your executive team by Jim and Mike, reach out to [email protected].

Elon Musk is a wild card in the tech industry's frantic effort to game out where a Trump-dominated Washington will come down on AI regulation, Axios' Scott Rosenberg writes.

• Why it matters: Musk, who has been at Trump's side since election night, has two very different personas when it comes to AI regulation. No one knows which of them will be whispering in Trump's ear.

⛈ 1. Musk has been obsessed with AI doomsday scenarios for at least a decade.

• He co-founded OpenAI in 2015, and provided initial cash for the nonprofit, in the name of protecting the world from runaway super-intelligence.
• In 2014, he told MIT students that pursuing AI without adequate safeguards was like "summoning a demon."

🦾 2. On the other hand, Musk has also launched a crusade against what he calls "woke" AI.

• In the name of freedom of speech, he built his new AI startup, xAI, around a commitment to abandoning guardrails that deter hate speech and misinformation.
• Musk's feud with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, rooted in a fight for control over the nonprofit's early development, now centers on Musk's complaint that OpenAI's models have a built-in liberal bias and stifle conservative views.

⚡️ Friction point: Advocates for regulating AI more — and for regulating it even less — are both counting on Musk to side with them.

Keep reading.

Over bacon and eggs at Mar-a-Lago, "Morning Joe" co-hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski reestablished diplomatic relations with their Florida neighbor, President-elect Trump, after years of taunting him — they knew he was watching as they warned he was an existential threat to democracy.

• Why it matters: Trump used to be a close friend of the show who was a frequent guest, and would call the hosts on their cellphones during breaks. But they hadn't spoken since March 2020, aside from a quick call by Scarborough to Trump after the attempt on his life in Butler, Pa.

📺 The hour-plus meeting, revealed on yesterday's MSNBC show, was held at 8 a.m. Friday in a room at Mar-a-Lago featuring a portrait of Trump in tennis togs.

• "Joe and I realized it's time to do something different," Brzezinski told viewers, "and that starts with not only talking about Donald Trump, but also talking with him."
• She noted that her late father, the famed diplomat Zbigniew Brzezinski, "often spoke with world leaders with whom he and the United States profoundly disagreed."

🔎 Behind the scenes: After revealing the summit, the hosts were attacked online for "normalizing" Trump. But I hear they also received a torrent of supportive texts from politicians, journalists and ambassadors.

• I'm told that Trump, amid his defiant transition moves, told them he wants to have better relations with the press, and to make some deals with Democrats.

The sides know they'll disagree, but agreed they'll try to do it without being personal and insulting.

• Scarborough told viewers they "talked about a lot of issues, including abortion, mass deportation, threats of political retribution against political opponents, and media outlets."

🌴 The other side: Trump told Fox News Digital in an interview yesterday that in order "to Make America Great Again, it is very important, if not vital, to have a free, fair and open media or press."

• Trump called the meeting "extremely cordial": "Many things were discussed, and I very much appreciated the fact that they wanted to have open communication ... In many ways, it's too bad that it wasn't done long ago."

Watch the video from yesterday's show ... Disclosure: Axios' Mike Allen and Jim VandeHei are longtime "Morning Joe" guests.

Today marks 1,000 days since explosions jolted Kyiv awake on Feb. 24, 2022, Russian troops mounted assaults on three axes, and Ukraine went to war, Axios' Dave Lawler writes.

• As these maps show, Ukraine halted the Russian offensive far short of Kyiv before launching a counteroffensive later in the year.
• Since then, much blood has been shed for much more limited gains.

Now it's Russia that's gaining.

• 🗺 While Russia's advances this year account for less than 1% of Ukraine's territory, President-elect Trump's win gives Moscow added confidence that Ukraine won't be able to reverse the tide.
• 💵 The U.S. has provided $64 billion in military aid over those 1,000 days — spending Trump has often criticized.

The other side: Ukrainian officials are preparing for the possibility of Trump-led peace talks.

• 🇷🇺 The land they've taken in Russia's Kursk region (map above) would be a significant bargaining chip.

⚡ The latest: President Biden has authorized Ukraine to use long-range missiles to fire against Russian and North Korean forces in Kursk.

• Today, Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a revised nuclear doctrine declaring that lowers the threshold for using nuclear weapons. Get the latest.

Go deeper.

The Federal Reserve system is designed to be insulated from partisan politics. But conservatives increasingly see it as an organization stacked with Democrats, Axios' Neil Irwin writes.

• Why it matters: Expect the Fed's current leadership to face hostile questions from Republican lawmakers on partisan lean — and for President-elect Trump's appointees to seek to reverse that perceived drift.

💸 By the numbers: In the 2024 election cycle, political donations by Fed staff totaled more than $600,000, with 92% going to Democrats.

• By contrast, in the 2000 election cycle, such donations were much lower (only about $32,000 total) — and about evenly divided among Republicans and Democrats, according to data from OpenSecrets.

Reality check: The Fed's leader for the last seven years has been Jay Powell, a Republican first appointed to the job by Trump. Powell was confirmed for his current term with 80 votes in the Senate, including 36 Republicans.

• Keep reading.

President-elect Trump is personally calling senators to press them to confirm former Rep. Matt Gaetz as attorney general, senators who have spoken with Trump tell Axios' Juliegrace Brufke and Hans Nichols.

• Why it matters: Trump is digging in on his embattled and controversial nominee and is sending an unmistakable message to Senate Republicans that he expects him to be confirmed.

🥊 "He clearly wants Matt Gaetz," said Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-N.D.), who got a call from Trump. "He believes Matt Gaetz is the one person who will have the fearlessness and ferociousness, really, to do what needs doing at the Department of Justice."

• "And at least to this point, he's putting his own political capital behind it," Cramer told Axios.

🏛️ What to watch: The House Ethics Committee is debating whether to release its report into allegations of sexual misconduct by Gaetz.

• 💧Either way, it's likely to leak.

Share this story. ... For more scoops like this, get Axios Hill Leaders.

In the other chamber, Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.) set off a firestorm with a bill to keep Sarah McBride (D-Del.), soon to be the first transgender member of Congress, from using women's bathrooms at the Capitol.

• "This is not just bigotry, this is just plain bullying," Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) told Axios' Andrew Solender.
• But even moderate Republicans seem open to the bill. "I mean, a presidential election may have been decided on this issue," one said.

🌴 Cabinet tracker: Trump picked Fox Business host and former Rep. Sean Duffy (R-Wis.) as Transportation secretary.

• Duffy, 53, a lawyer and former reality TV star, is the second member of the Fox News stable Trump has picked for the Cabinet, along with Pentagon pick Pete Hegseth.

What to know about Duffy.

Henry Kissinger joined forces with technologists Craig Mundie and Eric Schmidt to write a book on the subject that dominated his thinking in his final years: humanity's risk from AI.

• That book, "Genesis," is out today, two months after the former secretary of state died at 100.
• Also out: A video, shared first with Axios AM, in which the authors discuss their central theses.

What they're saying: Kissinger warns that humanity is "trying to wield a power it cannot possibly understand."

• 🦮 "Humans won't any longer be at the top of the scale in terms of intelligence, and that forces us to think differently about our relationship to everything," Mundie says. Schmidt says humanity could become "the dog" to AI's human.
• 🩻 There are enormous upsides, the authors note, of having a "polymath in your pocket" — and, say, diagnosing your illness.

Watch the video.

Editor's note: This item has been corrected to state the book was published a year after Kissinger's death.

Seven Christmas songs have already broken into Spotify's top 50, led by — you guessed it — Mariah Carey's "All I Want for Christmas Is You" (#16).

• 🦃 Hate it, particularly before Thanksgiving? We get it.

🧑‍🎄 Love it? Be like Axios Chicago's Carrie Shepherd (above) and visit a Mariah Carey Christmas pop-up holiday bar, which the Queen of Christmas has created in partnership with Virgin Hotels.

• The bars are popping up in Manhattan, Chicago, Nashville, Dallas and New Orleans.

Read Carrie's story ... More on locations.