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It’s the first full new day of Morning in America, and is it just our imagination that the sun seems a little brighter and the bird songs sweeter?
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Daily Bible Verse
6 And these words that I command you today shall be on your heart. 7 You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise.
Deuteronomy 6:6-7 ESV
Trump’s fast start
Good morning! It’s the first full new day of Morning in America, and is it just our imagination that the sun seems a little brighter and the bird songs sweeter?
At this writing, Trump is teasing that he will announce a “massive” infrastructure project. To find out more, Fox News has a continually-updated page of breaking Day One news from the Trump White House that you can check out here:
https://www.foxnews.com/live-news/a-look-at-president-trump-s-first-full-day-in-the-white-house
Trump’s Cabinet is also starting to take shape with a unanimous 99-0 vote for Marco Rubio as Secretary of State, his first pick to be confirmed.
https://townhall.com/tipsheet/leahbarkoukis/2025/01/20/rubio-n2650854
The Senate Armed Services Committee also advanced Defense Secretary nominee Pete Hegseth to the full Senate for a vote.
Trump 2.0
Monday's Inaugural of President Trump 2.0 was one of the smoothest, most patriotic and unabashedly American events in DC history. If you didn’t get to see it, here’s video of his full Inaugural Address.
Here are some key quotes, including the stirring declaration that “The golden age of America begins right now.”
https://pjmedia.com/matt-margolis/2025/01/20/key-quotes-from-donald-trumps-inaugural-speech-n4936164
And here’s a recap of Townhall.com’s live blog of Inauguration Day, with some lively commentary…
If you didn’t catch the speech and prayer by our friend, The Rev. Franklin Graham, it’s a must-see. Here’s video and an appreciation by Victoria Taft at PJ Media of why it was so strong.
Trump made it clear that the horrible policies of the past four years, like “the vicious, violent, and unfair weaponization of the Justice Department and our government, will end.” His supporters expressed joy online that Biden and Harris had to sit right there on stage and listen to it. They also noted that when Trump said free speech would again be protected, he got a standing ovation while Biden and Harris just sat on their hands, looking like they were sucking lemons.
Everything went off perfectly. Even the one glitch turned into a triumph: when Carrie Underwood’s music track failed to play (sabotage by AV Club leftists?), she showed why she’s an “American Idol” by singing a beautiful a cappella rendition of “America The Beautiful” (no autotune necessary) that instantly became iconic.
It was a perfect metaphor for the new day in America: Bitter Trump haters attacked her and threatened her career for daring to show her love of country by singing at a Presidential Inauguration. She defied them, and when faced with an obstacle, overcame it and triumphed. Now, her critics look irrelevant and she has a career-defining moment that will go down in history. It’s similar to how the powerful leftist showbiz gatekeepers wanted to send Trump to prison. Now, he’s President again, and where are Harvey Weinstein and P. Diddy?
Not that they're giving up. Some leftist groups are already launching lawsuits to try to stop Trump’s executive orders, and one even claims to be preparing impeachment papers for the “crimes” Trump committed during the Inauguration. We can’t help wondering how long it will take them to realize that most of us are now just laughing at them. They seem to forget that they had four years to steer the car and they ran over a lot of people and put it in the ditch. It’s now time for them to sit in the back seat and shut up while someone qualified takes the wheel – at least until Americans have enough time to forget just how badly things went the last time they were allowed to drive.
We should also mention that Melania Trump looked absolutely stunning in both her daytime and evening wear. We assume the economy is already being stimulated by clothing factories working 24/7 to turn out affordable knockoffs of those looks. It’s a disgusting testament to the bitter leftist partisanship of women’s fashion magazines that they never put her on a single magazine cover in four years. We can’t help wondering if they’ll keep up that TDS policy, and if so, when will a wealthy Republican launch a fashion magazine for non-leftist women, put her on the cover, and outsell all of them the way “Gutfeld!” is trouncing everything else on late night?
Finally, An Inaugural Video Exclusive! We obtained a clip of Joe Biden leaving the White House that nobody else has:
Trump keeps his word
True to his word, President Trump (it’s such a relief to remove the “-elect” from that title) signed a blizzard of executive orders. The first EO alone reversed 78 Biden executive orders! We don’t have the space to go through every one of them, but we’ll hit the high points and direct you to more information. In the meantime, you can watch the video of the signing ceremony and relive the thrill of knowing that every scratch of his pen helped return America back to sanity.
Some of Trump’s other executive orders included a federal worker hiring freeze and withdrawing us AGAIN from the Paris Climate Treaty. That’s the agreement that would cripple our economy with stringent energy restrictions while doing nothing about the worst polluters like China and India (China is building an average of two coal-fired power plants every week.)
Matt Vespa at Townhall.com has a round-up of more major Trump executive orders, which include declaring a national emergency at the Southern border and sealing it, ending “catch and release,” killing the app Biden’s people created to make it easy to apply for refugee status online, withdrawing the US from the World Health Organization, ending government DEI initiatives, creating DOGE, granting an extension to TikTok to find a new buyer, killing Biden’s EV mandate, reopening American fuel exploration and scrapping offshore wind power projects, blocking government censorship of free speech, ending “birthright citizenship” and affirming that it’s now government policy that there are only two genders (male and female, for those who’ve forgotten.)
Here are some of the pro-Israel EOs that Trump signed…
And here’s a mega-thread on X of all the EOs, some of them illustrated with hilarious Internet memes.
https://twitchy.com/samj/2025/01/21/trump-executive-action-mega-thread-lott-n2407070
Trump also immediately fired the top three officials in the immigration court system, whom he expected to try to thwart his deportation efforts.
It’s worth noting that Trump’s end to the mandates on EVs and hybrids will likely not make a bit of difference in how many of either type of vehicle is sold. Biden forced manufacturers to make EVs (bribing them with our tax money), but now they’re taking a bath because hardly anyone wants to buy them. It’s the same thing that happened years ago in California: The state mandated that a certain percentage of cars sold would be EVs without considering that there was no mechanism to force every third or so shopper to buy a car he didn’t want. So the mandate was rescinded. Darn freedom, ruining all those utopian progressive plans again!
It was also a tremendous waste of money for no result. EVs are no more friendly to the environment than ICE cars, when you consider the dirty, dangerous mining of the battery components, the tire wear, old battery disposal, and the toxic smoke and water runoff if they catch fire.
Meanwhile, hybrids are among the biggest sellers and sales are only rising. People like them because they combine great mileage with no range anxiety. The fact that they run cleaner is a nice bonus, but that’s not the reason people buy cars. As always, the market had the last word, and that word to Biden was “Scram.”
Good question
Liberal media outlets immediately began playing on viewers’ sympathies by showing wannabe border crossers crying in anguish that they were blocked from entering the US. But you can feel sorry for those people’s situation without thinking they should be allowed in. No other nation on Earth allows foreign nationals to stream across their borders because they’ll cry if they don’t. The posts didn’t get the desired reaction. Many commenters noted that if it was that easy for Trump to seal the border in one day, why didn’t Biden do it in four years? Yes, why didn’t he?...
Schiff reacts
Now-Senator Adam Schiff expressed his horror at Trump’s blanket pardon for the J6 defendants but we can’t seem to find any similar condemnations from him about Biden’s last-minute commutations of 2,500 federal defendants. As we reported when this happened, he claimed these were all “non-violent drug offenders” sentenced to disproportionately long sentences. But as usual with that crew, it took a few days for the truth to come out.
The New York Post reports that those 2,500 “non-violent” offenders include people who had multiple prior convictions, ran hard drug rings, beat a learning-disabled woman repeatedly, and forced women into sex trafficking, as well as a woman who is believed to have shot a victim in the chest during a burglary, but that wasn’t part of the charges against her.
Would you like to make any comments to these peoples’ victims now, Adam?
Trump takes command
By Ken Allard
Nothing in Joe Biden’s decades of government service was so contemptible, so unworthy of what the nation demands of its elected and unelected officials, as those disgraceful, last-minute pardons for his family and cronies – even while waiting in the White House for his successor’s arrival. In one breath-taking, all-too-improbable swoop, Mr. Biden revealed everything that his political and media allies stridently insisted for years were only the addled fantasies of his far-right opponents. And yet suddenly there was the Biden crime family standing naked and shivering in the clear, brutal sunlight of an arctic Inauguration Day. Highlighted by such infamy, the name Biden may ultimately rank alongside the Gambino’s, the Soprano’s or even Benedict Arnold himself; all were fellow-travelers governed only by self-interest.
Since only the guilty require pardons, the real question now is the extent of those artfully concealed damages. Since we must now assume that a succession of Bidenesque con artists systematically collaborated to acquire and conceal millions (or was it billions?) in ill-gotten gains, what American treasures must we now assume have been compromised, what mission-critical secrets sold at auction to empires grimly determined to purge us from the map? As one of their primary responsibilities, surely Mr. Trump’s new security team should be tasked with conducting a pitiless damage assessment. Historical precedent: When the badly startled Truman administration belatedly discovered that the Soviets – far from being loyal wartime allies - had systematically stolen the secrets of atomic bomb. In Calder Walton’s magisterial history, the surprise to US intelligence was so profound that it “blew apart the postwar international order and permanently changed relations between East and West.” https://www.amazon.com/Spies-Epic-Intelligence-Between-East/dp/1668000695 p. 181.
If there are degrees of infamy, then surely General Mark Milley’s name should be included in any damage assessment, regardless of his parallel pardon from Joe Biden. It was not enough that General Milley besmirched the name and reputation of Donald Trump, the president to whom the general owed uncompromising loyalty. First-order questions should include: Was General Milley involved directly or indirectly in the operations of the Biden crime family? Did he have any reason to suspect that the intimate, years-long business contacts between the Bidens and the PRC could have compromised American defense technology – or even our high-level intelligence sources and methods? If that sounds slightly paranoid, then remember that General Milley was Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff - the highest position in the American military establishment. In re-defining those duties with landmark legislation, Congress made clear tin 1986 hat the Chairman was directly responsible to the President, faithfully representing our armed services to their civilian masters. But that linkage runs in two directions: When you have clear evidence that the Big Guy has been compromised, then wisdom alone suggests the need for follow-on determinations. Are his closest associates involved as well?
The story about the Biden pardons was out-of-sight for most of Inauguration Day. Like millions of other Americans, my attention was captured by what our 47th President had to say about “the new American Golden Age” or “the revolution in common sense” that seemed to attract universal applause from every audience, no matter how frost-bitten. As a Texan, I cheered loudest when Mr. Trump swore to rebuild our badly overrun borders, to detain and expel criminal aliens and terrorist gangs like MS-13. It was not until the abbreviated First Honors ceremony - hastily re-located to the Capitol Hill Visitor’s Center - that I was visually reminded of just how small and hard-pressed our military has become. Each of our Armed Forces was represented by a platoon-sized honor guard; with flags and bands, probably less than 500 soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines.
Those folks, my beloved comrades-in-arms, today number less than half of one-percent of the American people! For over thirty years, the US Army pledged us to “fight out-numbered and win.” But I also learned an important truth from my Navy buddies, picked up from Admiral Lord Nelson, at the Battle of Trafalgar, way back during the Age of Sail: “Numbers annihilate.” Whether you are talking about drones, stealth fighters, tanks, ships or boots on the ground, those principles still apply to what the Soviets called “the constantly operating factors” of friction in the fog of war. Having voted for him three times, I will keep President Trump in my prayers, never forgetting that promises are one thing but that history is something else again.
Thanks, Mr. President and God bless you!
COL (Ret.) Ken Allard is a former West Point faculty member, Dean of the National War College and NBC News military analyst.
Pre-emptive pardons for Biden family and associates cover him with disgrace
There is nothing in living memory that compares with this.
On January 20, Inauguration Day 2025, Biden signed two waves of blanket pardons for those who might later be connected to federal criminal offenses. (He’d already pardoned son Hunter, in advance of his sentencing.) These included Anthony Fauci (!); retired Gen. Mark Milley; all nine members of the “Select” J6 committee who “investigated” Trump’s alleged role in the January 6 riot and are accused of destroying evidence and collaborating with witnesses; and some members of the Capitol and DC Metro Police who testified before that committee. Biden used the pretext that Trump might exact “revenge” on these people (translation: Trump might dare to impose the rule of law on people who have broken it).
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Dr. Fauci’s stunning “full and unconditional” pardon includes “any offenses against the United States which he may have committed or taken part in during the period from January 1, 2014, through the date of this pardon, arising from or in any manner related to his service as Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, as a member of the White House Coronavirus Task Force or the White House COVID-19 Response Team, or as Chief Medical Advisor to the President.”
https://instapundit.com/697338/
For a satisfying moment of unintentional hilarity, let’s look back at what J6 “Select” Committee member Adam Kinzinger said just a couple of weeks ago about pardons: “I don’t want it...because the second you take a pardon, it looks like you’re guilty of something…” Indeed. So, is he going to turn down the pardon Biden has just handed him, or will he adopt the lame (and untrue) excuse of Trump exacting “revenge” so he can take cover behind a pardon after all? Here’s the video clip and some fun comments...
https://twitchy.com/samj/2025/01/20/kinzingers-snotty-commentary-about-needing-a-pardon-n2406986
Biden’s second wave of pardons, for his own extended family, reportedly took place just before Biden entered the Capitol Rotunda for Trump’s swearing in --- not long before he and Jill would be escorted onto the helicopter that would thankfully TAKE THEM AWAY (Ben Shapiro noted that the last helicopter departure from a disaster this big was in Vietnam.) It’s hard to imagine a more sniveling, cowardly move by a departing President. Here’s what Biden actually said in this order, and we’ll pause if you need to fall to the floor, laughing helplessly at the irony of it all:
“I believe in the rule of law, and I am optimistic that the strength of our legal institutions will ultimately prevail over politics. But baseless and politically motivated investigations wreak havoc on the lives, safety, and financial security of targeted individuals and their families. Even when individuals have done nothing wrong and will ultimately be exonerated, the mere fact of being investigated or prosecuted can irreparably damage their reputations and finances.”
Tell it to the J6 detainees. The BABYLON BEE could not have phrased it better. Biden continued...
“For any nonviolent offenses against the United States which they may have committed or taken part in during the period from January 1, 2014, through the date of this pardon”...I give this “Executive Grant of Clemency” to “James B. Biden [Joe’s brother, Jim], Sara Jones Biden [Jim’s wife], Valerie Biden Owens [Joe’s sister], John T. Owens [Valerie’s husband], and Francis W. Biden [Joe’s other brother, Frank].”
And there’s that significant year of 2014 again. That’s the year that seems to have caught up son Hunter and other members of the Biden family.
https://instapundit.com/697333/
Among Biden’s many, many pardons and commutations, he also commuted the sentence of 80-year-old convicted murder Leonard Peltier, a native American who was convicted of killing two FBI agents in cold blood and later escaped from prison. He’ll be on home confinement.
FOX NEWS’ Sean Hannity had a fabulous segment on the pardons of family and cronies, including a clip from pre-emptively pardoned now-California Sen. Adam Schiff in 2020, talking hypothetically on MSNBC about pardons Trump might give...
Joy Reid: “Have you ever heard of somebody getting a [blanket] pre-emptive pardon who was innocent of all crime?...”
Schiff: “No….here, it’s an effort not only to prospectively pardon people for things they have not yet been charged with and may never be charged with, but also it’s the President’s own family...”
Sen. Chuck Schumer spoke about this as well, from the floor of the Senate: “The President’s reportedly asking his staff whether he can issue pre-emptive pardons for himself, his family members, Rudy Giuliani. There’s a simple answer: NO. No, Mr. President, that would be a gross abuse of the presidential pardon authority.”
This just gets more and more hilarious. President Trump got such grief for just looking into doing things (and deciding against) that Biden actually DID on a massive scale.
When Biden was asked in 2020 about the idea of Trump issuing pre-emptive pardons, he said, “Well, it concerns me in terms of what kind of precedent it sets and how the rest of the world looks at us as a nation of laws and, uh, injustice.” Presumably, at some point that concern went out the window.
Biden continued: “You’re not gonna see, in our administration, that kind of approach to pardons.” Yes, he actually said that. Apparently, he meant that his approach would be much MORE outrageous than Trump’s ever was.
And now, on his way out the door in 2025, Biden says of his pre-emptively pardoned family and friends, “Our nation owes these public servants a debt of gratitude for their tireless commitment to our country.” Really? Anthony Fauci and Liz Cheney? Very good summary here, highly recommended...
https://www.newsmax.com/politics/biden-trump-fauci/2025/01/20/id/1195711
As noted within, “It’s customary for a president to grant clemency at the end of his term, but those acts of mercy are usually offered to Americans who have been convicted of crimes. Biden has used the power in the broadest and most untested way possible: to pardon those who have not even been investigated yet. The decision lays the groundwork for an even more expansive use of pardons by Trump and future presidents.”
And that’s the danger with this. Biden’s scorched-earth approach, if not modified by the courts, could have a disastrous effect on our rule of law in future administrations, as Jacob Sullum explains in his article for REASON. This is the one to read, though we would argue that members of the J6 committee do, in fact, deserve to be investigated for crimes, such as witness tampering and obstruction of justice. It might take the Supreme Court to determine whether members of Congress can be.
The big problem here is that Biden’s broad use of the pardon power “could easily become a shield” for a president’s allies and administration officials who commit crimes. (We’ll include his family, too.) Take someone like Fauci, who allegedly lied about U.S. funding of gain-of-function research in Wuhan, China. With this pardon, we’ll never know if prosecutors could have proved this beyond a reasonable doubt, and he’ll also never be held to account.
If these pardons stand, future lawless presidential cohorts will essentially be able to do anything they want and be pardoned on their way out the door. This is SO OBVIOUS, it’s hard to believe everyone doesn’t immediately grasp it.
Jonathan Turley will no doubt have a lot to say on this in the coming days. On Monday, he said, “Biden has long exercised situational ethics, and with his powers coming to an end, the situation demanded that he cash out before his credit ended. In granting these pardons, Biden was seeking to protect not just his family but also himself. He was the object of the influence peddling and repeatedly lied to bury the scandal.”
“Reporters are now fully visible as willing dupes in one of the greatest corruption scandals in the history of this country.” (Some are still buying, or pretending to buy, Biden’s pretense for the pardons.)
Turley calls Biden’s move “the ultimate sign of contempt for the intelligence of the American public and the integrity of his office.” What integrity?
https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/5096041-biden-pardons-family-corruption/
One way Biden’s pardons could backfire, though --- and we’ve talked about this --- is that they take Fifth Amendment protections away from people who no longer face criminal liability. Thus, if GOP committees continue their investigations, pardonees could find themselves on a congressional witness list, liable for prosecution if they don’t tell the truth (and Biden can’t let them wriggle out of that.) Time to get Dr. Fauci on the stand...
Of course, President Trump made news today with pardons, too, but in a good way, as his were a careful, case-by-case look at people who had obviously been targeted by a weaponized DOJ and railroaded in biased DC courtrooms. (That’s the kind of situation most people imagine when thinking of appropriate presidential pardons.) Most of these people had done precisely nothing and were nevertheless put through a legal nightmare simply because they supported Trump and were there that day.
These are the people Trump refers to as “the J6 hostages.” THE EPOCH TIMES has a good review...
Also, Trump has done something that should’ve happened years ago: he rescinded the security clearances of the 51 former intel officials who signed the “classic earmarks” letter about Hunter’s laptop being Russian disinformation, when they had not examined it and had no reason to conclude that. It was a political stunt, election interference that WORKED to elect Biden in 2020. Elon Musk is glad that “the hammer of justice has come”...
https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1881522438531670271
In addition to taking away their security clearances (which they need to make the big bucks as private contractors), Trump also ordered his DNI and CIA head to investigate and report to him within 90 days on any other inappropriate activity related to that letter and recommend “any disciplinary action” that should be taken. We bet those 51 are sorry they’re among the few Biden cronies in DC who didn’t get preemptively pardoned.
Finally, we’ve been making fun of Biden’s pardons and having a good laugh at his expense, but for those whose lives were disrupted by the J6 prosecutions conducted by his weaponized DOJ, it’s not a joke. Investigative reporter Steve Baker, who finally ended up pleading guilty when facing a trial in DC for committing journalism, speaks here in this brief, must-see video about those whose lives have been affected far more than his has, he says --- the people who lost everything: their homes, spouses, careers, years of their lives. (We would add that some even committed suicide.) In most cases, these were innocent people who did nothing more than “walk through an open door at the Capitol on January 6,” yet their lives were destroyed.
“Thank you, President Trump,” he says as he chokes back tears, “for ending this nightmare for so many people. Thank you.”
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I will now refer to those pardoned by Brandon as "the pardoned criminal Liz Cheney, the pardoned felon Fauci, the pardoned traitor Milley, the pardoned perjurer Schiff."