The United States resumed its proud tradition of a peaceful and civil transfer of presidential power on Monday, inaugurating its 47th president, Donald Trump, who skipped the last inauguration after he lost the 2020 elections and his followers violently assaulted Capitol Hill in a deadly protest he fomented.
Outgoing president Joe Biden and vice president Kamala Harris smiled politely in the front row as Trump delivered an address that described a country in crisis brought about by flaws in their administration, and promised far-reaching policy reversals, including measures to codify gender descriptions to “male” and “female” only, and to regain control of the Panama Canal by force if necessary. He spoke of a foreign policy that “expands our territory” but in this address did not repeat the claims made in previous press conferences that he intends to annex Greenland.
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Trump promised to overhaul what he described in his address as a “weaponized” Justice Department after a jury of civilians in New York State unanimously found him guilty of 34 felony counts of falsifying business records after he paid hush money to a porn star. (Just minutes before the inauguration, Biden issued pre-emptive, irrevocable pardons for his siblings and other members of his family after Trump’s consiglieri had threatened legal vendettas against them.)
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America’s 45th and 47th president presented his account of how his opponents had tried to defeat him through judicial harassment and even assassination attempts, describing how a gunman’s bullet at a Pennsylvania rally last year pierced his right earlobe.
Trump said he had been “tested and challenged more than any president in our 250-year history.”
“I was saved by God to make America great again,” he said to raucous applause.
Another of the presidential decrees outlined in his reactionary speech was one that would remove the indigenous name of “Denali” from the country’s tallest peak, in Alaska, and restore it to its pre-2015 description as Mt. McKinley, named after the 25th US president, a pro-tariff Republican who was assassinated in 1901.
Similarly, he repeated that he would rename the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America, eliciting visible laughs from former first lady and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who narrowly lost to Trump in 2016.
Occupying the front row during all of this, to his left, were all of the living former US presidents and their spouses (with the exception of Michelle Obama, whose absence was also conspicuous at the funeral of former president Jimmy Carter earlier this month.) Occupying the front row to his right, obstructing the view of his own Cabinet picks, were social media billionaires never elected to public office, Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg and the CEO of X, South African-born Elon Musk, whom Trump has tasked with downsizing the US government.
The returning US president and founder of his own social media platform, Truth Social, announced that he would forbid, by executive order, any government attempt to suppress freedom of speech online. Immediately after Trump’s election, Zuckerberg ended his companies’ practice of fact-checking political posts and censoring hate speech on those platforms.
For only the second time in modern history this inauguration ceremony was held indoors, due to the frigid temperatures in Washington D.C., relocated to the Capitol’s rotunda rather than outside its western front. This meant that those supporters without a prestigious ticket to the event, or its satellite viewing locations in the adjacent Emancipation Hall or the 20,000-seat Capital One Arena, had to brave the temperatures outside the doors of Congress. Loud cries of “boo!” erupted there as each former US president not named Donald Trump emerged from the arriving motorcades.
Within minutes of Trump’s oath of office, the new White House press team released a list of executive order priorities, which included “ending Biden’s catch-and-release [immigration] policies, reinstating Remain in Mexico, building the wall, ending asylum for illegal border crossers, cracking down on criminal sanctuaries, and enhancing vetting and screening of aliens.”
It continued that Trump will, among dozens of other initiatives: suspend all refugee resettlement in the US; withdraw from the Paris Climate Accord governing greenhouse emissions; announce the America First Trade Policy, advertised in his campaigns as imposing high tariffs on a number of the US’ trading partners; and bring end to tax credits for renewable energy.
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