“President-elect Donald Trump will declare shortly after taking office on Monday that the federal government only recognizes two sexes — male and female — a move that reverses protections for transgender people put in place under outgoing President Joe Biden,” USA Today reports.

An incoming White House official who described the measure said it is about “restoring sanity.”

“Vivek Ramaswamy is leaving the federal government cost-cutting effort he planned to lead with Elon Musk and expects to announce a bid for Ohio governor a week after Donald Trump is sworn in as president,” the Wall Street Journal reports.

Russian President Vladimir Putin congratulated Donald Trump in televised comments to his country’s security council, the New York Times reports.

He welcomed Trump’s readiness to “restore direct contacts with Russia” and to “do everything to prevent World War III.”

President-elect Donald Trump will call for a “revolution of common sense” during his inaugural address, the Wall Street Journal reports.

According to prepared remarks, Trump will say: “I return to the presidency confident and optimistic that we are at the start of a thrilling new era of national success. A tide of change is sweeping the country. My message to Americans today is that it is time for us to once again act with courage, vigor and the vitality of history’s greatest civilization.”

“Donald Trump will order the renaming of the Gulf of Mexico and Alaska’s Mount Denali in his first hours as the 47th president,” the New York Post reports.

“The Gulf of Mexico will be rechristened the Gulf of America, and Denali, the highest mountain in North America, will revert to Mount McKinley — which it was called in the sight of the US government until President Barack Obama changed the name in 2015.”

“President-elect Donald Trump is planning to issue a broad memorandum Monday that directs federal agencies to study trade policies and evaluate U.S. trade relationships with China and America’s continental neighbors—but stops short of imposing new tariffs on his first day in office, as many trading partners feared,” the Wall Street Journal reports.

“Mayor Eric Adams left New York City in the middle of the night to head to the inauguration of President-elect Donald Trump, who has the power to pardon the indicted Democrat,” Politico reports.

“Adams received an invitation from someone on Trump’s team between midnight and 1 a.m. — an unusually late hour for a dignitary to be invited to a presidential inauguration, particularly since Trump and Adams dined together in Florida days earlier.”

“It ain’t gonna be that cold. Just because the oligarchs are there. They’re too tender, coming from Silicon Valley. Are they too soft?”

— Steve Bannon, in an interview with NPR, protesting moving Donald Trump’s inauguration indoors.

Shortly after being sworn in at high noon today, President-elect Trump plans to revoke security clearances of 51 former intelligence officials who signed a letter in 2020 saying emails from Hunter Biden’s laptop carried “classic earmarks of a Russian information operation,” Axios reports.

Peter Baker: “The last time President-elect Donald Trump took the oath of office, eight years ago, Washington and beyond bristled with tension and angry defiance. But the Resistance of 2017 has faded into the Resignation of 2025.”

“The mood leading up to the second Trump inauguration reflects how much has changed since the first Trump inauguration. Much of the world, it seems, is bowing down to the incoming president.”

Matthew Yglesias: “Even though he campaigned for a year and a half and then served four years in office and then campaigned essentially nonstop through four years of Joe Biden’s presidency, I have remarkably little clarity on what he actually intends to do as president.”

“Which is not to say that we’re completely in the dark… The one thing we really know about Trump is that there’s usually less to his bizarre policy pronouncements than meets the eye. When in doubt, he tends to default to not actually doing anything or else just enabling conventional right-wing politics.”

“But there really is an incredible amount that we don’t know.”