🇺🇸Good Wednesday morning, and welcome to Inauguration Day.
- Today's Smart Brevity™ count: 1,357 words ... 5 minutes.
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🇺🇸Good Wednesday morning, and welcome to Inauguration Day.
📱Hit Axios.com all day for our constantly updated Speed Screen dashboard, with all the news and smarts you want while you watch.
Vice President-elect Harris and her husband, Doug Emhoff, and President-elect Biden and Dr. Jill Biden arrive in Washington yesterday. Photo: Tom Brenner/Reuters
Reflecting both the man and the times, President Joseph Robinette Biden Jr.'s inaugural address needs as much reality as poetry.
A test for this unusual inaugural address is whether Biden can combine prose poetry with his “Here’s the deal” common touch.
Mike Barnicle writes in a Daily Beast column, "Why Joe Biden Will Be Our Most American President" (subscription):
What's next: After the festivities, Biden will take 15 "Day One Executive Actions," getting a head start on reversing Trump policies.
👀 What to watch ... Full schedule.
President Trump on Jan. 28, 2017, with two aides he later pardoned — national security adviser Michael Flynn and strategist Steve Bannon. Photo: Drew Angerer/Getty Images
It was 12:50 a.m. on Inauguration Day when President Trump announced 143 pardons and commutations — including a pardon for Steve Bannon.
Seventeen minutes later, the White House released an executive order that said it all about his failure to "drain the Swamp," as he'd promised in the '16 campaign:
Among Trump's final-hours pardons:
Photo illustration: Eniola Odetunde/Axios. Photos: Elijah Nouvelage, Alex Wong/Getty Images
Episode 7 of "Off the rails," our fly-on-the-wall series by Jonathan Swan and Zachary Basu:
"The end is coming, Donald." The male voice in the TV ad boomed through the White House residence during "Fox & Friends" commercial breaks.
President Trump, furious, told his vice president to send the Lincoln Project gang a cease-and-desist letter. In reality, this would have only further delighted Trump's tormentors and provided ammo for another ad.
The idea for the ad had popped into Steve Schmidt's head when he woke on the morning of Dec. 2. Schmidt was a former Republican strategist who had renounced the party and dedicated himself to its destruction after Trump's ascent. Schmidt was also a co-founder of the Lincoln Project.
By that afternoon, the Lincoln Project had finalized a 70-word script and shipped it to their lawyers. A cut of the commercial was ready early the next day, and by Dec. 10 the 38-second spot would hit the air. They made a cheap booking for Fox News shows running in the D.C. market.
Trump called Pence late morning on Jan. 6 to take one last shot at bullying the vice president into objecting to the certification of Biden's victory.
After all the bullying, the abuse, the Twitter tirades, the calls to violence, Pence assessed his options. He'd stood with Trump — not complaining, not explaining — through four years.
Go deeper: Read the full episode in the Axios stream.
Read the rest of the "Off the Rails" episodes here.
Via Fox News
A new right-wing conspiracy, sprouted by Fox News’ Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity, is spreading fast on social media: Joe Biden and the federal government are systematically silencing half of America. And it will only get worse.
Zoom in: Hannity on Monday night accused Democrats of "a chilling, Orwellian effort ... to silence, cancel, any opposition voices."
The big picture: Look for this to be a unifying argument of the right as the Biden era begins.
🦊 Two Fox News executives involved in the controversial — but correct — Decision Desk call of Arizona for Joe Biden are out, AP reports:
Fox said in a statement to Axios: "As we conclude the 2020 election cycle, Fox News Digital has realigned its business and reporting structure to meet the demands of this new era."
N.Y. Times Quotation of the Day, from a front-page, above-the-fold story, "It’s the Dawn of an Era. The Nation Is Exhausted" (subscription):
In the last four years, has there been a day when Trump wasn't somewhere in your orbit? Every day, I couldn't get him out. He was just everywhere. It was like an omnipresence.
Photo illustration: Sarah Grillo/Axios. Photo: Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images
The Capitol insurrection means the anti-tech talk in Washington is more likely to lead to action, since it's ever clearer that the attack was planned, at least in part, on social media, write Axios' Margaret Harding McGill, Ashley Gold and Ina Fried.
Illustration: Eniola Odetunde/Axios
Domestic terrorism has proven to be more difficult for Big Tech companies to police online than foreign terrorism, largely because the debate is so politically charged, writes Axios' Sara Fischer.
One of the key differences between ISIS and today's domestic extremists is that being part of ISIS, a group that designates its members, is effectively illegal, says Alex Stamos, director of the Stanford Internet Observatory and former Facebook Chief Security Officer.
Axios Sports' Kendall Baker and Jeff Tracy, who made these picks, give their top three candidates to take the crown during the Biden-Harris years:
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