They're donning MAGA hats in cafes, celebrating on social media and flying Trump flags: Supporters of President-elect Trump in deep blue cities and states are no longer keeping it to themselves, Axios' Erica Pandey writes.

• Why it matters: Trump improved on his 2016 and 2020 margins in almost every state and in most big, blue cities — even New York, L.A. and Chicago.

Many Trump voters in those cities saw his victory as validation, and are acting accordingly. Some residents of liberal enclaves tell Axios they've seen more Trump yard signs go up after the election than before it.

• Many supporters of Vice President Harris are grappling with the fact that their neighbors might not have voted the way they did.

Flashback: The "secret" Trump vote has been a phenomenon for the past few election cycles.

• A study from Columbia Business School found that among those who kept their choice a secret leading up to the 2016 election, two out of three went for Trump.
• "I think people recognize there is some kind of reputational cost of supporting Trump," says Columbia's Michael Slepian, who co-authored the study.

🔎 Zoom in: According to Slepian's research, people primarily keep their votes secret because they're concerned about their reputation, about conflicts with family and friends, and about feeling like they don't belong in their neighborhood or city.

• And while many people who supported Trump will continue to keep mum due to those concerns, others are seeing the rightward shift in blue cities and the broader support for Trump and deciding to go public.
• "There's such a stigma still with being a Trump supporter ... I'm not sure it's gonna be like that anymore," says Jonathan Alpert, a Manhattan-based psychotherapist who says patients told him they were keeping their support for the former president quiet before the election.

On TikTok, Instagram and beyond, some influencers who'd kept their political preferences hidden are going full MAGA, The Cut reports.

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President-elect Trump has set a modern record for staffing his government, with 12 Cabinet-level appointments in the 12 days since the election.

• That's 5 times faster than President Biden made the same number of picks for his administration — and 4 times faster than Trump's pick for his first administration, according to calculations for Axios by David Marchick, dean of the Kogod School of Business at American University and an expert on presidential transition.

Why it matters: Trump either "has the best and most efficient transition ever," Marchick said, or "is blowing up all norms and making picks on the fly without vetting, research or Senate consultations."

🧮 By the numbers: Trump took an average of 8 days post-election to make 12 Cabinet-level picks. Biden and President Obama took almost 40 days. President George W. Bush, slowed by the Bush-Gore litigation, took 50+.

• Marchick, lead author of the 2022 book, "The Peaceful Transfer of Power: An Oral History of America's Presidential Transitions," told us: "Biden, Obama and Bush followed well-established vetting processes. Trump has blown up those norms."

⚡ The latest: Trump named fracking executive Chris Wright as Secretary of Energy.

• Wright is founder and CEO of Liberty Energy — a fracking technology and oilfield services company — and an outspoken advocate for the industry, Axios' Nick Sobczyk reports.
• Wright drank fracking fluid on camera in 2019 to demonstrate its safety.

Will Scharf will be White House staff secretary, a powerful position that controls the flow of information to the president. Scharf "has played a key role in defeating the Election Interference and Lawfare waged against me, including by winning the Historic Immunity Decision in the Supreme Court," Trump said in the announcement.

• Quick bios of 20+ Trump picks for Cabinet, staff and ambassadorships.

President-elect Trump will be a private citizen for another two months, but his impending presidential arrival is already changing the world in ways big and small.

• Trump portends more protectionism, less U.S. spending and intervention overseas, and a new pecking order in which ideological alliances between leaders can matter more than treaty alliances between countries, Axios' Dave Lawler writes.

For prime ministers and CEOs all over the world, there is no time to waste. Their immediate post-election actions have run the gamut.

• On one end: South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol is taking his golf clubs out of storage so he'll be ready if Trump wants to play.
• On the other: Taiwanese officials are considering massive arms deals to show Trump — who has said the self-governing island should "pay us" if it wants protection from China — they're serious about their own defense.

In the private sector, companies are scrambling to shift production out of China, bolster inventory and weigh price increases, Axios' Nathan Bomey reports.

• Fashion company Steve Madden revealed that it plans to slash China-made products by 40% to 45% in a shift toward other countries — though not the U.S. — to avoid coming tariff hikes.
• "I've already started to see some volume from China shifted to Vietnam," a freight-industry executive told Axios.

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The number of votes cast in the 2024 presidential election approached 2020's record level, according to a new nationwide AP tally.

• More than half of this year's votes were cast before Election Day.

Why it matters: The result contradicts long-held conventional political wisdom that Democrats benefit from high-turnout elections, AP's Nick Riccardi reports.

• "Trump is great for voter turnout in both parties," said Eitan Hersh, a political scientist at Tufts.

🗳️ By the numbers: More than 152 million ballots have been counted so far, with hundreds of thousands of more still being tallied in slower-counting states, notably California. When those ballots are tabulated, the number of votes will come even closer to the 158 million cast in 2020 — the highest turnout election since women won the right to vote more than a century ago.

• This year's votes topped the 2020 total in each of the battleground states of Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, all of which Trump won. Arizona's turnout was nearly even to four years ago, as the state continued to count ballots.

Turnout has far eclipsed 2016, when 135.6 million voters cast ballots in a race won by Trump over Hillary Clinton.

• President-elect Trump leads Vice President Harris in the popular vote by nearly 3 million votes.

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Pete Hegseth — accused of sexual assault after being named by President-elect Trump to lead the Pentagon — paid a settlement to the accuser but is arguing to transition officials that the 2017 encounter was consensual, a lawyer for Hegseth tells Axios.

• The explanation by Hegseth, 44, a former Fox News co-host and decorated Army veteran, is being used by Trump transition officials preparing for the confirmation process.
• Hegseth's lawyer, Tim Parlatore, wouldn't disclose the amount of the settlement.

Context: In response to inquiries about Hegseth, the City of Monterey (Calif.) on Thursday released a statement saying police investigated an "alleged sexual assault" that occurred around midnight or in the early morning hours of Oct. 8, 2017.

• Police reported contusions, or bruises, to the woman's right thigh.
• The woman's name and age were kept confidential. Axios was unable to reach her, and does not identify a victim of an alleged sexual assault.

The other side: Hegseth is telling Trump officials that after he spoke at a California Federation of Republican Women convention on the evening of Oct. 7, 2017, he went to an afterparty at the hotel bar with several of the group's leaders, including the accuser.

• At the end of the afterparty, Hegseth left with the woman, according to a submission from his lawyer in 2021, when the two parties were threatening to sue each other.

"Video surveillance confirms that the two of them were walking together with arms locked together," says a statement Parlatore provided to Axios that summarizes the account given to Trump vetting officials.

• Axios hasn't seen the video. The lawyer, Parlatore, said he doesn't have it, and that the description came from the police investigation. Such a video would not establish consent.

A consensual sexual encounter followed, the statement says.

• The statement says the woman later approached authorities, and the case was closed after a review by the district attorney's office.

Hegseth in 2023 entered into a settlement with the woman and signed a mutual nondisclosure, Parlatore said.

• Knowing he could be fired from his role as a "Fox & Friends Weekend" co-host, Hegseth "ultimately decided to enter into a settlement" for significantly less money than the accuser had originally asked for.

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President-elect Trump has picked Cabinet members who vowed to remove "woke" influences from the federal government. They aim to fight against everything from school curriculums to transgender rights.

• Why it matters: "Woke" exploded into the American vernacular after the murder of George Floyd, and has been used to describe an awareness of other cultures and social inequities. But it's also been weaponized by conservatives, who have redefined the term as a threat to traditional values and cultural and racial norms in the U.S., Axios' Delano Massey and Russell Contreras write.

Progressives worry this anti-woke momentum threatens gains made over the six decades since the Civil Rights Movement.

• But now, even some Democrats are using the term in post-election critiques of their party's left wing.
• "When the woke police come at you," Rahm Emanuel, President Biden's ambassador to Japan, told New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd, "you don't even get your Miranda rights read to you."

⚡ Catch up quick: Martha S. Jones, a history professor at the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University, said "woke" has its roots in African American vernacular English.

• Over the past decade, "woke" gained prominence during the Black Lives Matter era, with Colin Kaepernick's anthem protests and the global demonstrations after Floyd's murder.
• It typically refers to an individual becoming more aware of social injustices, including bias, discrimination and double standards.
• "It was a term 'for us, by us,' long before the world cared about our language or explanations," Jones says.

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60 million households tuned into Netflix live to watch the fight between 27-year-old YouTuber-turned-boxer Jake Paul and 58-year-old former heavyweight champion Mike Tyson.

• Paul won the match-up.

Nearly 50 million tuned in for the Katie Taylor vs. Amanda Serrano — the night's other headliners — making it likely the most-watched women's sporting event in U.S. history.

• Taylor beat Serrano in a controversial finish.

More than 60 contestants gathered at a park in Chicago yesterday to see who looked most like Jeremy Allen White, the blue-eyed, curly-haired, moody star of "The Bear."

• The winner: Ben Shabad from Glenview, Ill.

Roommates Taylor Vaske and Kelsey Cassaro "sarcastically" put together a flyer last week and spread the word on TikTok, thinking the event would attract about 10 people, Axios Chicago's Carrie Shepherd writes.

• Hundreds showed up, including multiple media outlets and dozens of Jeremy hopefuls in white T-shirts, blue aprons and cigarettes who strutted, posed and puffed for applause.

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