On today’s show: Peter Baker of The New York Times joins to discuss the state of America as President Biden leaves and President-elect Trump is inaugurated. The latest from Gaza, where three hostages were released by Hamas as part of the ceasefire deal. The BBC explains who they are. Israel also released the first wave of Palestinian prisoners. NBC News has the details. Plus, President-elect Trump promised to save TikTok after it briefly went offline over the weekend; a polar vortex is bringing extremely cold weather to a big swath of the county, while dangerous winds threaten fire efforts in L.A.; and on MLK Day, Martin Luther King Jr.’s son has a message for Trump.
Chapter 1: What happened on Inauguration Day?
Good morning. It's Monday, January 20th. I'm Shamita Basu. This is Apple News Today. On today's show, Hamas and Israel exchange hostages for captives in the first phase of the ceasefire deal. TikTok is back after a weekend of confusion. And MLK Day and Inauguration Day collide. But first to Washington, where Donald Trump will be formally sworn in as president today for the second time. J.D.
Vance will become the third youngest vice president. Some notable attendees include former presidents Obama, Clinton and Bush and former Vice President Mike Pence. Several tech CEOs are also reportedly attending, including Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Tim Cook, Jeff Bezos, and TikTok CEO Sho Chu, according to Axios.
Sub-freezing temperatures are forcing today's ceremony indoors to the Capitol Rotunda instead of out on the National Mall. Still, thousands of Trump supporters traveled to the nation's capital to celebrate the event. Some spoke to the local CBS affiliate.
I think this is a pivotal point in America and the world, as a matter of fact, because the people are actually in control now again. And this is actually amazing.
And unlike eight years ago, the counter-protest movement was fairly tame. CNN spoke to people rallying out on the mall.
Have people given up? Is the resistance dead?
It's not dead.
I think that it's taken a beat down, though, because, I mean, with the whole thing with Roe being turned over, it's just been like a gut punch.
Meanwhile, in President Biden's final hours in office, he issued a slew of pardons to preemptively protect people who might face prosecution from Trump, including Dr. Anthony Fauci, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark Milley, and members of the January 6th Congressional Committee. In a statement, Biden called them public servants who haven't engaged in any wrongdoing.
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Chapter 2: How did Trump’s presidency differ from Biden's?
And he'll enter office with his party controlling both chambers of Congress and a clear conservative majority on the Supreme Court. That gives Trump an opportunity to fundamentally change government, perhaps even more so than he did in his first term. At a rally last night, Trump told supporters that, quote, four long years of American decline would end with his inauguration.
And he promised a flurry of executive orders.
You're going to see something tomorrow. You're going to see executive orders that are going to make you extremely happy. Lots of them. Lots of them.
Trump's reelection signaled a deep dissatisfaction among a majority of the electorate with the Biden administration. For Biden, it leaves him in a unique position. If he continues the tradition of leaving a handwritten note for the next president in the desk drawer in the Oval Office, Biden will be the only president to address his letter to the very person who left one for him four years ago.
To understand this moment of transition and what it means for our country, I called up Peter Baker. We spoke at the end of last week. He's chief White House correspondent for The New York Times and someone who's chronicled the Oval Office for decades. I started by asking Peter how he's reflecting on Biden's legacy and the state of the country that Trump will inherit.
Well, Biden's legacy is a little complicated in the sense that he came to office intending more than anything to rid the country of Trump. Right. He defeated him. He was very proud of that. And he talked about his goal of moving the country back to some sort of normality. But instead, he's leaving office now, turning the White House back over to the same person he
that he considers to be a fascist and a threat to democracy. But the state of the country is actually probably better than it has been for a new president going back for quite a number of years. There are no American troops in a war overseas. You know, inflation is now back down to relatively normal levels. Unemployment is near historic lows. The Economy's growing. The stock market is soaring.
Border crossings, which was such a big bane of Biden's tenure, down even below where it was when Trump left office. Crime down. So he's got a lot of good things he can talk about, but he's leaving office as a one-term president. I think that this is a tough day for him.
You mentioned that one of Biden's promises was a sort of return to normalcy. Normalcy is a tricky word to bring up in political conversations now, right?
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Chapter 3: What is the state of America after Biden's presidency?
And last time you and I spoke, Peter, we were talking about this as a big moment of realignment for American politics. How are you thinking about that now?
Yeah, I think that's exactly right. I think people who told themselves that Trump was an aberration and he was an asterisk in the history books, that he was a fluke president who only got in because of the circumstances of 2016 in the Electoral College, that's all proven not to be the case. Now, he did not win a massive landslide no matter how many times he says that.
It was a very narrow victory, 1.5 percentage points in the popular vote. one of the smallest margins of victory since the 19th century. But he did win. And right now he has the wind in his back politically. The Republicans are deferring to him on his nominations, no matter how controversial, no matter how scandal-tard they might be. Democrats have not figured out an effective counter to him.
And I think that right now it's a high moment for Trump. And he recognizes that he has a short amount of time, that the window will close quickly before lame duck period begins to set in and people begin to think about the next presidency. So he's looking at the next two years as being a very important time for him to make the kind of changes he wants to make.
We are inaugurating our first president who is also a convicted felon. And we should say just days before inauguration, this special counsel report about Trump's efforts to overturn the 2020 election results was made public. Jack Smith says he thinks prosecutors had enough evidence to convict. Does any of this matter?
It does, yes, in the sense that obviously we have shattered a precedent here. We have shattered norms. We've never knowingly elected a felon to be president. Now, some presidents have done things in office that might have qualified them, but nobody was ever actually charged or convicted before, much less elected after being convicted.
But I think that the assumption was that, yeah, he was done politically. And that was a wrong assumption. He proved that a lot of the country, his supporters, his backers, see the world through the lens that he sees it.
As we head into this second Trump presidency now, what are you expecting to see in the first 100 days?
Well, he's promising a lot of action, as many as 100 executive orders in the first day alone. And he's going to try to push the boundaries on all sorts of issues, on immigration with the mass deportations he's talking about, on restructuring the federal government to get rid of as many nonpartisan federal workers as possible and replace them with his own partisan loyalists who will answer to him.
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Chapter 4: What challenges does Trump face in his second term?
The deal that his own vice president has outlined is the kind of deal that Moscow has already said it likes, which is that Russia gets to keep the country that it illegally seized by force and Ukraine would have to declare its neutrality and therefore in effect surrender. That's the kind of thing that would have been rejected in the last four years.
But under Trump, it may be where this is heading.
Peter, is there anything else on your mind on this inauguration day?
What I think a lot of people are watching to see is what Trump has learned from the first term, right? He came into office as the first president in our history who had not had a single day in public office of the military, didn't understand how government worked. Well, four years later, eight years later, really now, he understands a lot more about it.
He had learned how to turn the levers of power. And so in a second term, all the things he tried to do in a first term but couldn't, but was talked out of, was thwarted or obstructed in some way or another, he's going to have more ability to figure out how to enact. If we thought the first term was eventful and volatile, well, buckle up because we're in for quite a ride.
Peter Baker, thanks for your time.
Thank you. Appreciate it.
For ongoing inauguration coverage, check out the Apple News app. Now to Gaza, where the initial terms of a ceasefire deal between Israel and Hamas are now in effect. Yesterday, Hamas released three hostages in exchange for Israel releasing 90 Palestinians who were held in Israeli prisons. Let's start with the hostages.
Three women, Romy Gonen, Doran Steinbrecher, and Emily Damari, were released yesterday after being held captive by Hamas for 471 days. Hamas! Hamas! Hamas! Video shows the chaotic moment when Hamas militants, who were standing on top of Red Cross vehicles surrounded by crowds, handed the three women over to Israeli forces. The women were reunited with their families Sunday evening.
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Chapter 5: How does Trump's legal history affect his presidency?
Emily Damari, a 28-year-old British-Israeli national, was taken hostage from the same kibbutz. She was shot during the attack, and in videos after her release, her bandaged hand was seen missing fingers. And Romi Gonen was 23 when she was captured at the Nova Music Festival. Gonen was on the phone with her mother during the attack. She recalled her daughter telling her she had been shot.
In exchange for the hostages, Israel released 90 Palestinians, all women and children who had been held in detention centers. They arrived in Ramallah, a city in the West Bank, on Red Cross buses in the early hours of Monday morning. Palestinians in the West Bank have felt the effects of this war in a very acute way.
Many will say they have loved ones or know of someone who has been detained by Israel. In this prisoner release, Israel banned their families from publicly celebrating. According to The Guardian, that's because Israel does not want their release to be interpreted as a victory by Hamas.
Meanwhile, though, in Gaza, people were out celebrating in the streets to mark the start of what many hope will be a reprieve for more than 15 months of near-daily bombardments. AFP reports how within minutes of the ceasefire agreement going into effect on Sunday, hundreds of people began the long walk back home to northern Gaza, passing huge mounds of rubble as they went.
One displaced Gazan told a reporter that they arrived back to their home city to find, quote, massive, unprecedented destruction. He said there is nothing left in the north worth living for. Despite the ceasefire, Israeli strikes and resulting deaths and injuries continued to mount right up until the deal went into effect. Over the course of the war, more than 46,000 Palestinians have been killed.
The ceasefire deal is divided into three phases. This first phase lasts six weeks, during which Hamas is due to release 33 hostages, and Israel is expected to release 1,900 Palestinians. Details on the future phases haven't been hashed out yet. Big questions remain about what happens next. In particular, will the ceasefire hold? And if so, what will happen to Gaza?
Here's Bloomberg correspondent Dan Williams in Jerusalem talking about those challenges.
The big problem here, the rub in moving from phase one to phase two and three is not just what happens with the remaining two-thirds of the hostages for Israel. It's whether Israel will formally relent on its binding government-approved war goal of seeing Hamas completely destroyed or at least dismantled as a governing and military force in the Gaza Strip.
I'm not sure Hamas will allow that, will submit to that, unless in the course of that, for future negotiation, Hamas agrees to some sort of power share, voluntarily relinquishing power in the Gaza Strip.
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Chapter 6: What can we expect from Trump's first 100 days?
And as of today, TikTok is back.
Trump says he will issue an executive order giving TikTok more time to find a new buyer. This comes after the app shut down for millions of users in the U.S. this weekend to comply with a law passed by Congress, which says because of China's ownership of TikTok's parent company, the popular app poses a major security risk. The unpause of the ban led to confusion over the weekend.
Here's user Faiz Rug, who has 12 million followers on the app.
Is TikTok officially back after only being banned for like 14 hours? Not going to lie, we were all freaking out. Like we all thought our lives were over without an app.
The Associated Press has a good timeline of TikTok's rollercoaster ride over the past few years, including how Trump's position on it flipped. In other news, in Southern California, dangerous Santa Ana winds are expected to pick back up this week, increasing the risk of wildfire spread, just as residents are starting to return home.
The National Weather Service issued its most extreme alert for the windy conditions. And a polar vortex is set to grip large swaths of the country over the next few days. One National Weather Service meteorologist told NPR anything east of the Rockies will see lower than normal temperatures, with wind chills in some places potentially reaching minus 50 degrees.
And finally, it's MLK Day, only the second time ever it's fallen on Inauguration Day. And as Donald Trump reassumes the Oval Office, Martin Luther King Jr. 's son, Martin Luther King III, told USA Today that he wants Americans to double down on the work his father started of making America a more equal society.
The King family has a goal of having Americans participate in 100 million hours of community service by 2029, the year Martin Luther King Jr. would have turned 100 years old. In fact, MLK Day is the only national holiday designated as a day of service. You can find all these stories and more in the Apple News app.
And if you're already listening in the news app right now, we've got a narrated article coming up next. New York Magazine looks at how several new startups are in the business of friendship making as Americans have become increasingly lonely. If you're listening in the podcast app, follow Apple News Plus Narrated to find that story. And I'll be back with the news tomorrow.
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