--:-- Shamita Basu: Good morning. It's Monday, January 20th. I'm Shamita Basu. This is Apple News Today.
--:-- Shamita Basu: 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.
--:-- Shamita Basu: 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.
--:-- Shamita Basu: 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 travel to the nation's Capitol to celebrate the event. Some spoke to the local CBS affiliate.
--:-- [Audio clip of Trump supporters speaking to the local CBS affiliate]
--:-- Shamita Basu: 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.
--:-- Shamita Basu: CNN spoke to people rallying out on the mall. Have people given up? Is the resistance dead?
--:-- [Audio clip of CNN speaking to people rallying out on the mall]
--:-- Shamita Basu: 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.
--:-- Shamita Basu: 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.
--:-- Shamita Basu: In a statement, Biden called them public servants who haven't engaged in any wrongdoing. This comes after Trump has repeatedly said he would go after his political enemies.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The changing of presidents is always historic, of course, but today seems extra significant. Trump will be the first convicted felon to hold the highest office.
--:-- Shamita Basu: He's also the oldest president to take the oath. Then he'll enter office with his party controlling both chambers of Congress and a clear conservative majority on the Supreme Court.
--:-- Shamita Basu: That gives Trump an opportunity to fundamentally change government, perhaps even more so than he did in his first term.
--:-- Shamita Basu: 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.
--:-- Shamita Basu: 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.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Trump's reelection signaled a deep dissatisfaction among a majority of the electorate with the Biden administration.
--:-- Shamita Basu: 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.
--:-- Shamita Basu: 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.
--:-- Peter Baker: 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.
--:-- Peter Baker: 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.
--:-- Peter Baker: But instead he leaving office now turning the White House back over to the same person that he considers to be a fascist and a threat to democracy
--:-- Peter Baker: 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.
--:-- Peter Baker: 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 is growing. The stock market is soaring.
--:-- Peter Baker: Border crossings, which was such a big bane of Biden's tenure, down, even below where it was when Trump left office, crime down.
--:-- Peter Baker: 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.
--:-- Peter Baker: 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?
--:-- Peter Baker: I mean, the reaction to the first Trump presidency, at least in some circles, was to treat him as someone who was not operating under the normal terms, someone with extreme views, someone who said things a lot of politicians weren't or wouldn't at the time.
--:-- Peter Baker: The reaction this time around seems to be that he represents a lot of Americans.
--:-- Peter Baker: And last time you and I spoke, Peter, we were talking about this as a big moment of realignment for American politics.
--:-- Peter Baker: How are you thinking about that now?
--:-- Peter Baker: 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.
--:-- Peter Baker: 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.
--:-- Peter Baker: But he did win. And right now he has the wind in his back politically.
--:-- Peter Baker: The Republicans are deferring to him on his nominations, no matter how controversial, no matter how scandal-tard they might be.
--:-- Peter Baker: Democrats have not figured out an effective counter to him.
--:-- Peter Baker: And I think that right now it's a high moment for Trump.
--:-- Peter Baker: And he recognizes that he has a short amount of time, that the window will close quickly before the lame duck period begins to set in and people begin to think about the next presidency.
--:-- Peter Baker: 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.
--:-- Peter Baker: We are inaugurating our first president who is also a convicted felon.
--:-- Peter Baker: 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.
--:-- Peter Baker: Jack Smith says he thinks prosecutors had enough evidence to convict.
--:-- Peter Baker: Does any of this matter?
--:-- Peter Baker: Yes. In the sense that obviously we have shattered a precedent here. We have shattered norms.
--:-- Peter Baker: 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.
--:-- Peter Baker: But I think that the assumption was that, yeah, he was done politically.
--:-- Peter Baker: 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.
--:-- Peter Baker: As we head into this second Trump presidency now, what are you expecting to see in the first 100 days?
--:-- Peter Baker: Well, he's promising a lot of action. As many as 100 executive orders in the first day alone.
--:-- Peter Baker: 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.
--:-- Peter Baker: I think you'll see very quickly, you know, moves on issues related to the economy, on tariffs against other countries, or at least using that as a threat in negotiations.
--:-- Peter Baker: And I think you'll see some effort to solve the Ukraine war. At least he says he'll try to solve it by making some sort of a deal.
--:-- Peter Baker: We don't know what that deal would look like, but he's already talking about meeting with Vladimir Putin.
--:-- Peter Baker: 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 sees by force and Ukraine would have to declare its neutrality and therefore in effect surrender
--:-- Peter Baker: That the kind of thing that would have been rejected in the last four years
--:-- Peter Baker: But under Trump, it may be where this is heading.
--:-- Peter Baker: Peter, is there anything else on your mind on this inauguration day?
--:-- Peter Baker: What I think a lot of people are watching to see is what Trump has learned from the first term, right?
--:-- Peter Baker: 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.
--:-- Peter Baker: Well, four years later, eight years later really now, he understands a lot more about it.
--:-- Peter Baker: He had learned how to turn the levers of power.
--:-- Peter Baker: 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.
--:-- Peter Baker: If we thought the first term was eventful and volatile, well, buckle up because we're in for quite a ride.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Peter Baker, thanks for your time.
--:-- Peter Baker: Thank you. Appreciate it.
--:-- Shamita Basu: For ongoing inauguration coverage, check out the Apple News app.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Now to Gaza, where the initial terms of a ceasefire deal between Israel and Hamas are now in effect.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Yesterday, Hamas released three hostages in exchange for Israel releasing 90 Palestinians who were held in Israeli prisons.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Let's start with the hostages. Three women, Romi Gonan, Doran Steinbrecher, and Emily Damari, were released yesterday after being held captive by Hamas for 471 days.
--:-- Shamita Basu: 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.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The women were reunited with their families Sunday evening.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Doran Steinbrecher, who is 31 years old, is a veterinary nurse. She was abducted from her family's home during the Hamas-led attack on October 7th.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The BBC reports she was hiding under a bed as Hamas militants entered her home. She sent a voice message telling her family she was scared and said, quote, they have caught me.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Emily Damari, a 28-year-old British-Israeli national, was taken hostage from the same kibbutz.
--:-- Shamita Basu: She was shot during the attack, and in videos after her release, her bandaged hand was seen missing fingers.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And Romy Gonan was 23 when she was captured at the Nova Music Festival.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Gonan was on the phone with her mother during the attack. She recalled her daughter telling her she had been shot.
--:-- Shamita Basu: In exchange for the hostages, Israel released 90 Palestinians, all women and children who had been held in detention centers.
--:-- Shamita Basu: They arrived in Ramallah, a city in the West Bank, on Red Cross buses in the early hours of Monday morning.
--:-- Shamita Basu: 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.
--:-- Shamita Basu: In this prisoner release, Israel banned their families from publicly celebrating.
--:-- Shamita Basu: According to The Guardian, that's because Israel does not want their release to be interpreted as a victory by Hamas.
--:-- Shamita Basu: 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.
--:-- Shamita Basu: 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.
--:-- Shamita Basu: One displaced Gazan told a reporter that they arrived back to their home city to find quote, massive, unprecedented destruction.
--:-- Shamita Basu: He said there is nothing left in the north worth living for
--:-- Shamita Basu: Despite the ceasefire Israeli strikes and resulting deaths and injuries continued to mount right up until the deal went into effect
--:-- Shamita Basu: Over the course of the war more than 46 Palestinians have been killed
--:-- Shamita Basu: 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.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Details on the future phases haven't been hashed out yet.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Big questions remain about what happens next. In particular, will the ceasefire hold? And if so, what will happen to Gaza?
--:-- Shamita Basu: Here's Bloomberg correspondent Dan Williams in Jerusalem talking about those challenges.
--:-- Dan Williams: 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.
--:-- Dan Williams: 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.
--:-- Dan Williams: 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.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Now to some other stories we're following today.
--:-- Shamita Basu: In Trump's first term, he's supported banning TikTok. Now, he says, one of the first things he'll do when he's sworn in is save it.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And as of today, TikTok is back.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Trump says he will issue an executive order giving TikTok more time to find a new buyer.
--:-- Shamita Basu: 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.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The unpause of the ban led to confusion over the weekend.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Here's user FaZe Rug, who has 12 million followers on the app.
--:-- FaZe Rug: Is TikTok officially back after only being banned for like 14 hours? Not gonna lie, we were all freaking out.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Like we all thought our lives were over without an app.
--:-- Shamita Basu: 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.
--:-- Shamita Basu: 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.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The National Weather Service issued its most extreme alert for the windy conditions.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And a polar vortex is set to grip large swaths of the country over the next few days.
--:-- Shamita Basu: 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.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And finally, it's MLK Day. Only the second time ever it's fallen on Inauguration Day.
--:-- Shamita Basu: 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.
--:-- Shamita Basu: 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.
--:-- Shamita Basu: In fact, MLK Day is the only national holiday designated as a day of service.
--:-- Shamita Basu: You can find all these stories and more in the Apple News app.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And if you're already listening in the News app right now, we've got a narrated article coming up next.
--:-- Shamita Basu: New York Magazine looks at how several new startups are in the business of friendship making as Americans have become increasingly lonely.
--:-- Shamita Basu: If you're listening in the podcast app, follow Apple News Plus Narrated to find that story.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And I'll be back with the news tomorrow. Thank you.
