MEIN TRUMPF: President Donald Trump announced immediately after taking office that the “The golden age of America begins right now.”

  In a speech frequently insulting to now former President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris sitting just to his left, Trump said, “My recent election is a mandate to completely and totally reverse a horrible betrayal and all these many betrayals that have taken place and give people back their faith, their wealth, their democracy and indeed their freedom. From this moment on, America’s decline is over.”

  After spending years undermining faith and confidence in the federal government, Trump said the government “confronts a crisis of trust,” but he’s going to fix it.

  Trump claimed that he was saved by God from an assassin’s bullet “to make America great again,” granting himself assurance of the rightness of his path. In a messianic message he said, “Over the past eight years, I have been tested and challenged more than any president in our 250-year history.” 

  Trump announced a “revolution of common sense” in which he would immediately declare a national emergency at the southern border and send in the military. He said he would end government diversity, equity and inclusion, so-called “DEI” programs, rename the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America, return the name of Alaska’s Denali to Mt. McKinley, and take back the Panama Canal. “We’re taking it back,” he said.

  In a casually chilling remark, he mentioned expanding US territory.

  Ticking through a list of plans and promises, Trump said he will designate foreign drug cartels as terrorist organizations; bring down prices and inflation; cancel the green new deal and electric car “mandate”; place tariffs on foreign countries “to enrich our citizens”; and “drill baby drill” for oil to lower fuel prices.

  Trump declared that US government  policy will be that there are only two genders, male and female. He did not mention previous promises to end the Russian war on Ukraine.

  Interestingly Barron Trump, 18, was the only member of the Trump family who pointedly stepped over to President Joe Biden and his wife Jill and shook their hands. 

THE POSTGAME SHOW: Last night at the White House Trump signed a full pardon for 1500 defendants in the January 6^th insurrection … the people he had called the “J6 hostages.” He also signed an order ending birthright citizenship even though that is established in the Constitution.

  In a speech to his followers following the inauguration, Trump was more himself, ranting about his great election victory, the excellence of his border wall construction, Joe Biden’s pardons, Nancy Pelosi refusing troops during the January 6^th insurrection, and the January 6^th investigating committee deleting and destroying all of its materials and evidence as a coverup.

  The J-6 committee in fact issued a more than 800-page report as well as releasing videos, transcribed interviews, depositions, and other documents. 

  Later in the day at the crowded Capitol One Arena, Trump sat at a desk emblazoned with the presidential seal and made a show of signing executive orders, the first, a rescission of 78 Biden orders followed by a withdrawal from the Paris Climate Accords and another requiring federal workers to return to the office.

PARDON THEM: With just 20 minutes left in his presidency, Joe Biden pardoned five members of his family in a pre-emptive act of protection from feared political prosecution under President Trump.

  “My family has been subjected to unrelenting attacks and threats, motivated solely by a desire to hurt me — the worst kind of partisan politics,” he said in his last statement as president. “Unfortunately, I have no reason to believe these attacks will end.”

  Those pardoned are James Biden, his brother; Sara Jones Biden, James’s wife; Valerie Biden Owens, Biden’s sister; John Owens, Ms. Owens’s husband; and Francis Biden, Biden’s brother.

  Biden also commuted the life sentence for Leonard Peltier, the Native American activist convicted of murdering two FBI agents in 1975 on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota. Peltier, 80, will serve the remainder of his time in home confinement.

THE OBIT PAGE: Cecile Richards, the former president of Planned Parenthood who was one of the country’s most prominent defenders of abortion rights, died yesterday at age 67. She had a brain tumor.

  She was a daughter of the outspoken and funny former Gov. Ann Richards of Texas.

  Richards ran Planned Parenthood from 2006 to 2018, overseeing the country’s largest provider of reproductive health care and sex education during a period of increasing attack that ultimately ended in the June 22 Supreme Court decision overturning the national right to abortion.

  Richards said in a 2022 essay published in The NY Times that “I underestimated the callousness of the Republican Party and its willingness to trade off the rights of women for political expediency.”

THE SPORTING NEWS: Ohio State crushed Notre Dame 34-23 last night to win the college football championship. Ohio’s Quinshon Judkins scored three touchdowns.

THE SPIN RACK: The Chinese-owned social media platform TikTok is back online following Donald Trump’s promise to save it with an executive order. —Billionaire Vivek Ramaswamy, who was present at the inauguration, has bowed out of Donald Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency to run for governor of Ohio. Ramaswamy reportedly was not getting along with Elon Musk, the marquis name in DOGE. — Only days before the inauguration Trump and his wife Melania launched “meme coins”, a form of cryptocurrency. His is named $Trump, hers is $Melania.” — Paris Olympics bronze medals designed by the French luxury and jewelry conglomerate Louis Vuitton are flaking and falling apart, causing as many as 100 athletes to ask for replacements. LV has been silent and so far Monnaie  de Paris, the French mint, which produced the medals, has taken responsibility for the flaws.  

BELOW THE FOLD: One critic said that after watching the Trump inauguration she wished she was sitting on a beach along the Gulf of America.

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