Happy Saturday.Smart Brevity™ count: 1,197 words ... 4½ mins. Edited by TuAnh Dam.
🇺🇦 Breaking: Russian missiles hit Ukraine's port of Odesa, the day after a deal to unblock grain exports and ease global food shortages. Keep reading.
1 big thing: Trump's revenge
Photo illustration: Sarah Grillo/Axios. Photo: Al Drago/Getty Images
President Trump was attending the National Prayer Breakfast, but showing no sign of grace, Jonathan Swan writes in Part 2 of his 12,000-word reporting tour de force, "Inside Trump '25."
Lips pursed, face alternating between anger and frustration, he lashed out at enemies who had brought him to the doors of impeachment. He brandished the day's newspapers. The first headline: "ACQUITTED." The next: "Trump Acquitted." It was Feb. 6, 2020.
Close aides believed Trump had crossed a psychological line during his Senate trial. He now wanted to get even — he wanted to fire every single last "snake" inside his government. To activate the plan for revenge, Trump turned to a young take-no-prisoners loyalist with chutzpah: his former aide John McEntee.
By the end of that year, Trump also had a second tool in his armory, a secret weapon with the innocuous title, "Schedule F." The intention of this obscure legal instrument was to empower the president to wipe out employment protections for tens of thousands of civil servants.
Why it matters: If former President Trump runs again in 2024 and wins back the White House, people close to him say, he would turn to both levers again.
It is Schedule F, combined with the willpower of top lieutenants like McEntee, that could bring Trump closer to his dream of gutting the federal bureaucracy and installing thousands devoted to him or his "America First" platform.
🥊 Trump declined to be interviewed for this series. He is already facing campaign-finance legal scrutiny for having hinted too much about his intentions to run in 2024 without formally declaring his candidacy.
Trump's closest confidant in Congress, Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), is excited about the prospects of mass firings in a second Trump term.
He said in an interview with Axios that he had talked about it with another person close to Trump and that "the line that we talked about was, 'Fire everyone you're allowed to fire. And [then] fire a few people you're not supposed to, so that they have to sue you and you send the message.' That's the way to do it."
When Axios asked for the former president's response to this reporting, spokesperson Taylor Budowich declined to address point-by-point specifics.
Instead, he said in a statement: "There are many people who want to see President Trump return to the White House, and the polls show that he is in a dominant position for 2024. However, anyone performing the important research and vetting that this story described is doing it at their own discretion."
Amid all the rumbling about wage growth failing to keep up with resurgent inflation, they've been more than holding their own.
Wages grew 12% for the youngest workers in June, more than twice the rate for those between 24 and 54, according to data from the Atlanta Fed's wage growth tracker.
Younger Americans are outperforming the old, even in absolute dollar terms. A 3.7% raise on the over-55 median weekly wage of $1,240 is $46; a 12.5% increase on the under-24 median wage of $707 is $88.
🧠 What's happening: It's normal for younger workers, who are just starting out and earning less, to see faster wage growth than their older, more experienced peers. But the spread has never been this wide (as the chart above shows).
It helps that in this jobs recovery, the biggest gains are happening at the bottom — with hourly, low-wage, and less-educated workers getting wage increases that have mostly kept up with inflation.
💭 "I have two girls in their early 20s, over the last two years they've seen their wages more than double," Crit Thomas, Global Market Strategist for Touchstone Investments, said in an email. "I hope they don't think this is normal."
Thomas is over 55 — and very much not keeping up with inflation, he added.
We told you in Axios PM that former White House strategist Steve Bannon was speedily convicted yesterday of two contempt charges for defying a subpoena from the House Jan. 6 committee.
Bannon — a former Goldman Sachs banker whose podcast, "War Room," is heavy on "America First" nationalism — held up the same reading material as he arrived at court Wednesday (above) and left yesterday after being found guilty (below) ... the pink-hued, London-based Financial Times.
Photo: Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images
Context: Bannon says you need to read/watch the enemy. He often plays MSNBC clips on "War Room." The dining room table at "The Embassy," his Capitol Hill redoubt, is often laid with the N.Y. Times or The Economist.
5. 📦 Underestimated Amazon
Illustration: Shoshana Gordon/Axios
For all its size and power, people continue to underestimate Amazon by focusing on what the company is already doing, instead of where it will go next, Axios' Ina Fried writes in her weekly tech column, "Signal Boost."
Why it matters: Amazon's strategy of expanding into large new markets not only enables it to surprise competitors and avoid regulators, but also helps it continue to show big growth despite how huge it has become.
Amazon announcedThursday it plans to buy health care provider One Medical for roughly $4 billion.
It's hardly the company's first move into health care: Amazon already owns an online pharmacy after buying PillPack, and operates Amazon Care, a virtual primary care service.
💡 How it works: Like an iceberg, Amazon is always bigger than what's visible.
In its earliest days in the '90s, observers worried about Amazon's impact on bookstores. The company was already laying plans to take over other parts of online retail.
By the time rivals worried about Amazon's dominance of online retail as a whole, it was moving into logistics, third-party marketplaces and web services.
As the world woke up to Amazon's strength in those areas, the company was expanding into physical retail. Whole Foods was its biggest play. But it also entered the cashier-free market with Amazon Go. Amazon is now licensing that technology to others.
What's next: FTC chair Lina Khan made her reputation with research into Amazon's practices, and has been working to rewrite merger guidelines to address these kinds of deals.
Team USA's Sydney McLaughlin celebrates with "Legend the Bigfoot," mascot of the World Athletics Championships in Eugene, Ore. — after winning gold and setting a world record in women's 400-meter hurdles.
It's the fourth time in 13 months that she's broken the world record in that event.
Google expands phishing protections to keep more people safe
To counter the rise in phishing attempts in collaborative working tools, Google is expanding its proven AI-powered phishing protections to Google Workspace.
You are automatically alerted if the doc you're working in contains a suspicious link, and are taken back to safety.
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