The inauguration of President Donald Trump as the 47th President of the United States was the most prominent over-arching news story of the day on Monday. The reactions of Arizona’s elected leaders ranged from joy, excitement, and relief to cautious rapprochement, vehement rejection, petulant accusations, and denial.
Support for Trump by Republican members of Congress and other prominent figures has been consistent in Arizona, while unexpectedly some Democrats have taken a moderate, even conciliatory stance toward the President.
Tucson-area Republican Congressman Juan Ciscomani posted from within the Rotunda writing, “Honored to attend the inauguration of our 47th President — Donald J. Trump! And I look forward to working together and delivering for the American people[.] Congratulations, President Trump!”
Honored to attend the inauguration of our 47th President — Donald J. Trump! And I look forward to working together and delivering for the American people 🇺🇸
In a subsequent ‘selfie’ with Trump, Ciscomani quoted the President’s inaugural address writing, “’In America, the impossible is what we do best.’ —President Donald J. Trump [.] Now we get to work fighting for the American Dream!”
“In America, the impossible is what we do best.” —President Donald J. Trump
Rep. Paul Gosar (R-AZ-09) posted to the social network writing, “It’s a new day in America. Our long nightmare is soon over. 4 yrs of divisiveness, failures, corruption, weakness will be replaced w/ hope, strength, prosperity & American greatness. I look forward to working w/Pres Trump 2 make the future of this great country great, once again.”
Congressman Greg Stanton (D-AZ-04) told AZCentral, “As President Trump retakes office, here’s my promise: I’ll work to find common ground when it’s in Arizona’s best interest.” Stanton emphasized that he would remain loyal to the “fundamental freedoms,” of Arizonans.
District 5 Republican Andy Biggs, who announced his exploration of a gubernatorial run on Tuesday, posted “Hail to the Chief,” and told Trump, “Welcome back, Mr. President.”
Freshman Republican Rep. Abe Hamadeh appeared with Trump’s Voice of America Director Designee Kari Lake in a Newsmax spot during the President’s arrival at St. John’s Episcopal Church. He shared video to X writing, “We will pass President Trump’s America First Agenda as quickly as possible.”
Congressman Abe Hamadeh: “We will pass President Trump’s America First Agenda as quickly as possible.” pic.twitter.com/8ZBM3DgUjF
During the inaugural festivities, District 4 Rep. Eli Crane wrote, “We made it. Today is January 20th, and Donald J. Trump will be sworn in as President of the United States. The greatest political comeback of all time. Now the real work begins. Let’s go!”
He added a short panoramic video of the Capital Rotunda’s interior in the lead up to the ceremony adding, “So thankful to all of the Arizonans that put in the work to get to this moment.”
Took a quick selfie video of the rotunda ahead of President Trump's arrival.
So thankful to all of the Arizonans that put in the work to get to this moment. pic.twitter.com/fIOTT8hqHN
Meanwhile Freshman Democrat Rep. Yassamin Ansari ,who took the seat of now-Senator Ruben Gallego, blew off the inauguration, eschewing it for a Martin Luther King, Jr. Day event in Phoenix. Posting to X, Ansari derisively noted the attendance of big tech figures such as Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, X’s Elon Musk, and Google’s Sundar Pichai: “Nothing to see here… just Donald Trump’s inauguration… front row featuring the richest men on Earth excited to get even richer at the expense of working people.”
Nothing to see here… just Donald Trump's inauguration… front row featuring the richest men on Earth excited to get even richer at the expense of working people.
Follow Democrat Rep. Raúl Grijalva issued a call for his fellow radical leftists to resist Trump writing, “Democrats must stand up to Trump’s worst impulses and grifting tendencies if we are to come away from this a stronger, more prosperous nation.” He also criticized Trump for his recent successful meme-coin launch, calling it a “brazen and unethical money grab.”
President Trump has begun his four years with a grift on the American people by launching a cryptocurrency the night before his inauguration. This is a brazen and unethical money grab that will leave his unsuspecting supporters to pay the tab.
Pointedly, the Arizona Democratic Party (ADP) opted not to mark the inauguration at all with neither a post to social media nor a press release on its website. Rather, the ADP chose to publish a post honoring Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. almost as if in denial that the inauguration of Donald J. Trump as the 47th President of the United States happened.
The 2026 gubernatorial race may be a showdown between a veteran lawmaker known for challenging the D.C. status quo and the Biden administration, and the state’s first Democratic leader in over a decade, Governor Katie Hobbs.
Biggs, a longtime member and former chair of the House Freedom Caucus, has made his mark in Congress as a fiscally conservative hardliner. This was made especially clear during the pandemic, when other Republicans unified with Democrats time and again on increasing spending to offset emergency government mandates which crippled the economy.
Biggs was just one of the only two representatives to vote against the $8 billion for COVID-19 pandemic aid in early March of 2020. The congressman remarked in a public statement at the time that President Donald Trump had requested a fraction of that “bloated” amount ($2 billion) to fund a federal response to the outbreak.
Biggs’ assessment of the political climate at the time — issued exactly a week before Trump declared a national emergency for the COVID-19 pandemic — ultimately proved a wise warning unheeded:
“Throwing money at a potentially serious issue does not alleviate the American people’s concerns. Nor does politicizing the issue to score points for future elections,” said Biggs. “Congressional Republicans and Democrats should join the White House to calmly, wisely, and pro-actively communicate a unified response to their constituents. We must rise to the occasion and do what is best for this situation – as well as for future generations.”
Biggs was also one of only a few dozen who voted against the $15 billion Families First Coronavirus Response Act passed days later.
In all, the federal government spent $4.6 trillion on COVID-19.
Biggs would continue to oppose efforts to mitigate unchecked spending. In 2023, Biggs fought against Congress’ plan to raise the debt ceiling.
Biggs’ other key votes included his opposition to the National Defense Authorization Act of 2022, in large part on the basis of since-removed provisions requiring women to register for the draft.
The congressman has consistently supported legislation to close and prioritize the U.S. border over aid to foreign countries’ military efforts. Consistent with his dedication to securing American interests first, Biggs has consistently voted against the billions in funding afforded to Ukraine under the Biden administration.
In 2021, that first year of the border crisis, Biggs sponsored a resolution to impeach then-Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas. In subsequent years, Biggs signed onto several efforts to impeach former President Joe Biden as well as former Attorney General Merrick Garland.
During his eight years in Congress, Biggs has sponsored over 900 bills and cosponsored nearly 1,300 bills.
Only one of Biggs’ bills has passed Congress, made it to the president’s desk, and became law: HR 4983, designating the Department of Veterans Affairs community-based outpatient clinic in Gilbert as the Staff Sergeant Alexander W. Conrad Veterans Affairs Health Clinic.
35 of Biggs’ cosponsored bills made it to the president’s desk. Three were vetoed, and 32 became law.
This session, Biggs has introduced over 80 proposed bills on a wide scope of red-meat Republican issues to strengthen and enforce immigration laws, modify individual health coverage requirements, restrict executive national emergency authority, prohibit vaccine and mask mandates, roll back foreign intelligence surveillance, require greater performance measures from various agencies, tie congressional salaries to budgeting agreements, pull back on various agencies’ spending or authority, abolish certain agencies, expand veteran care options, undo spying on Americans, simplify congressional bills, eliminate DEI funding in federal government, expand oil and gas production, ban abortion, and establish school choice, to name a few.
Biggs currently sits on the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform and Committee on the Judiciary.
Other declared Republicans who filed statements of interest: Christopher Ames, Scott Neely, and George Nicholson. One declared Libertarian, Barry Hess, filed a statement of interest.
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Just a few years ago, ESG was all the rage in the banking and investing community as globalist governments in the western world focused on a failing attempt to subsidize an energy transition into reality. The strategy was to try to strangle fossil fuel industries by denying them funding for major projects, with major ESG-focused institutional investors like BlackRock and State Street, and big banks like J.P. Morgan and Goldman Sachs leveraging their control of trillions of dollars in capital to lead the cause.
But a funny thing happened on the way to a green Nirvana: It turned out that the chosen rent-seeking industries — wind, solar and electric vehicles — are not the nifty plug-and-play solutions they had been cracked up to be.
Even worse, the advancement of new technologies and increased mining of cryptocurrencies created enormous new demand for electricity, resulting in heavy new demand for finding new sources of fossil fuels to keep the grid running and people moving around in reliable cars.
In other words, reality butted into the green narrative, collapsing the foundations of the ESG movement. The laws of physics, thermodynamics and unanticipated consequences remain laws, not mere suggestions.
Making matters worse for the ESG giants, Texas and other states passed laws disallowing any of these firms who use ESG principles to discriminate against their important oil, gas and coal industries from investing in massive state-governed funds. BlackRock and others were hit with sanctions by Texas in 2023. More recently, Texas and 10 other states sued Blackrock and other big investment houses for allegedly violating anti-trust laws.
As the foundations of the ESG movement collapse, so are some of the institutions that sprang up around it. The United Nations created one such institution, the “Net Zero Asset Managers Initiative,” whose participants maintain pledges to reach net-zero emissions by 2050 and adhere to detailed plans to reach that goal.
The problem with that is there is now a growing consensus that a) the forced march to a green energy transition isn’t working and worse, that it can’t work, and b) the chances of achieving the goal of net-zero by 2050 are basically net zero. There is also a rising consensus among energy companies of a pressing need to prioritize matters of energy security over nebulous emissions reduction goals that most often constitute poor deployments of capital. Even as the Biden administration has ramped up regulations and subsidies to try to force its transition, big players like ExxonMobil, Chevron, BP, and Shell have all redirected larger percentages of their capital budgets away from investments in carbon reduction projects back into their core oil-and-gas businesses.
The result of this confluence of factors and events has been a recent rush by big U.S. banks and investment houses away from this UN-run alliance. In just the last two weeks, the parade away from net zero was led by major banks like Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Citigroup, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, and, most recently, JP Morgan. On Thursday, the New York Post reported that both BlackRock and State Street, a pair of investment firms who control trillions of investor dollars (BlackRock alone controls more than $10 trillion) are on the brink of joining the flood away from this increasingly toxic philosophy.
In June, 2023, BlackRock CEO Larry Fink made big news when told an audience at the Aspen Ideas Festival in Aspen, Colorado that he is “ashamed of being part of this [ESG] conversation.” He almost immediately backed away from that comment, restating his dedication to what he called “conscientious capitalism.” The takeaway for most observers was that Fink might stop using the term ESG in his internal and external communications but would keep right on engaging in his discriminatory practices while using a different narrative to talk about it.
But this week’s news about BlackRock and the other big firms feels different. Much has taken place in the energy space over the last 18 months, none of it positive for the energy transition or the net-zero fantasy. Perhaps all these big banks and investment funds are awakening to the reality that it will take far more than devising a new way of talking about the same old nonsense concepts to repair the damage that has already been done to the world’s energy system.
David Blackmon is a contributor to The Daily Caller News Foundation, an energy writer, and consultant based in Texas. He spent 40 years in the oil and gas business, where he specialized in public policy and communications.
Arizona Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Horne praised the heroic actions of Tucson Police Officer William Bonanno, deployed under a Department of Education program to Legacy Traditional School-East Tucson, after he was able to arrest armed suspect Daniel Hollander, 31. Hollander was reported by parents for “acting erratically” in the school parking lot and was arrested, armed with a knife and loaded handgun.
In a statement published by KVOA following the arrest, Horne told reporters, “Today we avoided the nightmare of an armed maniac harming innocent people on a school campus. The School Safety Officer who sought out and arrested this suspect deserves the highest praise. His presence on campus is due to funding provided by the School Safety Program managed by my department and demonstrates the value of this program so that incidents like this do not become tragedies.”
In a post to X, Horne wrote, “The School Safety Program helped save the lives of innocent children yesterday. Thank you to the School Resource Officer for helping to avert tragedy. I will fight to have an SRO on every campus to keep students safe.”
The School Safety Program helped save the lives of innocent children yesterday. Thank you to the School Resource Officer for helping to avert tragedy. I will fight to have an SRO on every campus to keep students safe. https://t.co/QmystFhVBX
In an article from the Arizona Department of Education, Horne said that the actions of Officer Bonanno saved the lives of 20 students and saved their parents from having their lives ruined by the grief that would have resulted. He emphasized that the narrowly-averted tragedy serves to demonstrate the need for Arizona lawmakers to take action and fund more armed officers on school campuses, while calling upon them to ramp up criminal penalties for suspects entering school grounds with intent to injure or kill innocent people.
Horne said:
“For years, I have been pushing for more police officers in the schools, saying repeatedly that if a maniac Invades a school and kills 20 students as has happened in other states and could happen here, their parents would never recover. If they learned that the school could have had a police officer to defend their children funded by the Department of Education, and decided not to, you can imagine what they would feel about that decision making. By the skin of our teeth, we avoided that nightmare by a police officer, newly funded by the Department of Education annually, on the job arresting a man who was in a room with 20 students and additional adults, who said that he was going to make the students immortal by killing all of them.”
He added, “Only the heroic actions of the School Safety Officer, William Bonanno, prevented a catastrophe. He undoubtedly saved lives because of his incredible professionalism in that he was experienced enough to act quickly rather than wait for backup. The presence of an armed officer has sadly become a crucial element of campus safety, and this incident proves that beyond a doubt. The heroism of this officer means that more than 20 families have not experienced the tragic death or injury to an innocent child. As a parent who has suffered the loss of a child, I can tell you that you never get over it.”
“We cannot allow the status quo where not enough schools have armed officers to continue. More funding for officers and legislation that allows retired officers to become School Safety Officers or Resource Officers should be passed. Representative Matt Gress is sponsoring such a bill, HB 2074, which has passed the House Education Committee. It needs to be fast-tracked through the legislature and signed by the governor as soon as possible because, as we saw yesterday, lives are at stake.”
As reported by AZCentral, Tucson Police Chief Chad Kasmar told a Thursday presser that Officer Bonanno discovered Hollander sitting in the school gymnasium talking to himself. Not long before, students had filled the gymnasium waiting for classes to start. The Chief revealed that Hollander admitted he had been using narcotics for “several days” and admitted he was at the school with the intent to harm children.
“I can tell you with the preliminary history of this individual, it wouldn’t have been somebody that was probably on our radar,” Kasmar added.
Horne is urging the legislature to pass House Bill 2074, which is now out of committee, in order to push more funding out to districts to fund additional School Safety Officers.
State Rep. Matt Gress who sponsored HB 2074 said in a statement, “What happened in Tucson yesterday was an act of heroism that nearly became a terrible tragedy. Lives were saved because an armed officer was doing his job at the Legacy East campus. This proves that, sadly, no space is entirely safe, and we must do everything we can to protect innocent lives. My legislation will do that, and I call on all my colleagues, regardless of political affiliation, to get this bill passed, and I also call on Governor Hobbs to sign this bill when it reaches her desk. It is an essential, non-partisan issue that needs immediate attention.”
A recent study from Search Logistics has yielded an encouraging result for the Phoenix metro area, ranking the city as the 14th best city in the nation for young entrepreneurs. The survey from the UK SEO firm ranked the fifty most populous cities in the U.S. by analyzing co-working affordability, wage data, internet infrastructure, tax data, cost of living, and personal income.
According to the study provided to AZ Free News, each of the determining factors was assigned a rank value out of 100 and the overall index score was calculated to produce a ranking. Although Phoenix was outstripped by Florida cities Jacksonville, which ranked #1, and Tampa in second place, followed by Texas centers like Fort Worth, Houston, San Antonio, in the Southwest there seemed to be a consistent pattern: cities in conservatively governed, business-friendly states ranked best with the exception of Baltimore, MD.
“The city that was revealed as the best for young entrepreneurs was Jacksonville, FL, with an overall index score of 70.91 out of 100. Jacksonville ranked best in cost of living, with a score of 92.82 out of 100.
Following in second place was Tampa, FL, with an index score of 70.35 out of 100. Tampa reported the best internet speed of any city in the study, with an average download speed of 180.5 Mbps. This meant that it scored 100 out of 100 for this factor.
In third was Indianapolis, IN, with an index score of 69.10 out of 100. The city performed well among the cost of living factors, producing a score of 95.98 out of 100.
Baltimore, MD, ranked fourth, generating an index score of 67.08 out of 100. Baltimore’s best category was cost of living, with a perfect score of 100 out of 100.
Rounding out the top five was Fort Worth, TX, with an index score of 65.15 out of 100. Notably, Fort Worth was among several cities that offered the lowest minimum wage of $7.25, which meant it scored the maximum 100 out of 100 for this factor.
Completing the top 10 best cities for young entrepreneurs were Houston (63.45), Philadelphia (63.14), San Antonio (62.71), Raleigh (62.60), and Charlotte (62.17).”
Conversely, cities which would be traditionally associated with the growth of big tech and finance like New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, Washington, D.C., Portland, and Chicago ranked low. Matthew Woodward, a spokesperson for Search Logistics said, “While it may be tempting to start a business in New York or California, young entrepreneurs locating to a city in another state may pay off significantly, especially while their venture is still in its infancy. Young entrepreneurs will be able to reap the benefits of all that these cities have to offer and enjoy living in a city that will support their work as much as possible.”
Notably, Mesa, AZ, was excluded from the rankings, owing to a lack of co-working space available. This was also true of Fresno, CA; Bakersfield, CA; Long Beach, CA; Oakland, CA; and Arlington, TX.
Woodward added, “This ranking may provide some clarity for young and budding entrepreneurs wondering where to launch their business. This can often be a difficult decision to make as there are many factors to consider, such as cost of living, tax regulations, access to co-working spaces, and internet infrastructure. Fortunately, certain cities will likely be more conducive to business owners and allow their enterprises to flourish easily.”
“According to the ranking, cities in southern states, such as Florida, North Carolina, and Texas, tend to be some of the best for young entrepreneurs. Many of these have a lower cost of living and are therefore more affordable options.”
