🧤 Good Thursday morning. Today's Smart Brevity™ count: 1,470 words ... 5½ minutes.
🧤 Good Thursday morning. Today's Smart Brevity™ count: 1,470 words ... 5½ minutes.
The Axios experts help you sort significance from symbolism. Here are the six Day 1 actions by President Biden that matter most:
Investors made clear what companies they think will be winners and which will be losers in President Biden's economy, Dion Rabouin writes in Axios Markets:
What we're watching: Additional Biden economic orders could include a campaign proposal to provide $15,000 in tax credits to first-time homebuyers, according to Jaret Seiberg of Cowen Washington Research Group.
Our thought bubble: Such a policy would pour gasoline on the already blazing housing market, as record-low mortgage rates have already brought down the monthly cost of homeownership significantly.
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Photo illustration: AĂŻda Amer/Axios. Photos: Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images
The astonishing vivid reporting in Episode 8 of "Off the rails," the Jonathan Swan and Zachary Basu series on President Trump's final days, takes you, like a movie, inside the Capitol and West Wing during the riot: Senators huddle in prayer, snap at each other. A top Trump aide packs up in disgust.
The morning after the deadly riots, Trump showed no remorse as he interacted with his dwindling staff at the White House. By now, he was fixating on the perceived disloyalty of Republicans he had believed would do anything for him.
Before Trump gave that speech, the White House made a request to Twitter and Facebook to unlock the president's banned accounts for the purpose of putting out his written press release condemning violence.
Yesterday, after a blast of pardons, Trump departed the White House at 8:20 a.m.
👀 Read the full episode in the Axios stream: It's true fly-on-the-wall history — one long-motion scene takes you fleeing with senators through the Capitol.
Photo: Presidential Inaugural Committee via Getty Images
Former Presidents Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama came together in a video for the Presidential Inaugural Committee's primetime special, "Celebrating America."
The pace of new coronavirus infections fell significantly over the past week, but the virus is still out of control, and a more contagious variant is gaining ground, Axios' Sam Baker and Andrew Witherspoon report.
The U.S. averaged roughly 198,000 new cases per day in the final week of the Trump administration — a 19% drop from the week before, but still a ton of cases.
Experts say a more contagious variant of the coronavirus will soon become the dominant strain in the U.S., allowing the virus to spread even more easily.
Trust in traditional media has declined to an all-time low, and many news professionals are trying to do something about it, Axios' Felix Salmon writes.
For the first time ever, fewer than half of all Americans trust traditional media, according to data from Edelman's annual Trust Barometer, shared exclusively with Axios. Trust in social media has hit an all-time low of 27%.
61% of Trump voters say they trust their employer's CEO. That compares to just 28% who trust government leaders, and a mere 21% who trust journalists.
The bottom line: CEOs have long advocated upgrades to America's physical infrastructure. Now they have a chance to use the trust they've built up to help rebuild our civic infrastructure.
Illustration: AĂŻda Amer/Axios
Tech employees are on high alert about their own personal safety as their employers roll out policies to ban or limit the reach of far-right extremists angry over former President Trump's defeat, Ashley Gold writes.
In pro-Trump online communities, vague threats about a reckoning coming for Big Tech companies are circulating widely, as they have been for some time.
In President Biden's Oval Office, a bust of Cesar Chavez, the labor leader and civil rights activist, is nestled among an array of framed family photos displayed on a desk behind the new president, AP reports.
One carryover from President Trump: Biden is also using the Resolute Desk.
Amanda Gorman, 23, the country's first National Youth Poet Laureate, referenced everything from scripture to "Hamilton" — and echoed JFK and MLK — in a performance at the Biden-Harris swearing-in that captivated America.
With urgency and assertion, AP's Hillel Italie writes, Gorman began "The Hill We Climb," by asking: "Where can we find light / In this never-ending shade?"
We, the successors of a country and a time,
Where a skinny black girl,
Descended from slaves and raised by a single mother,
Can dream of becoming president,
Only to find herself reciting for one.
Gorman helped inspire — along with Vice President Harris — the Twitter hashtag "#BlackGirlMagic."
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