Donald Trump was sworn in as U.S. president on Monday, ushering in another turbulent four-year term with promises to push the limits of executive power, deport millions of immigrants, secure retribution against his political enemies and transform the role of the U.S. on the world stage.
Trump stood with his hand on a Bible inside the U.S. Capitol just before noon ET (1700 GMT) and took the oath of office to “preserve, protect and defend” the U.S. Constitution, administered by Chief Justice John Roberts. His vice president, JD Vance, was sworn in just before him.
Trump intends to sign a raft of executive actions in his first hours as president, incoming White House officials said on Monday, including 10 focused on border security and immigration, his top priority.
The president will declare a national emergency at the southern border, send armed troops there and resume a policy forcing asylum seekers to wait in Mexico for their U.S. court dates, officials told reporters.
He will also seek to end so-called birthright citizenship for U.S.-born children whose parents lack legal status, a move some legal scholars have said would be unconstitutional.
The inauguration completes a triumphant comeback for a political disruptor who survived two impeachment trials, a felony conviction, two assassination attempts and an indictment for attempting to overturn his 2020 election loss.
The ceremony was moved inside the Capitol due to the extreme cold, four years after a mob of Trump supporters breached the building, a symbol of American democracy, in an unsuccessful effort to forestall Trump’s loss to Joe Biden.
Biden and outgoing Vice President Kamala Harris, who lost to Trump in November, were on hand inside the Capitol’s Rotunda, along with former presidents Barack Obama, George W. Bush and Bill Clinton. Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who lost to Trump in 2016, arrived with her husband Bill, but Obama’s wife, Michelle, chose not to attend.
Numerous tech executives who have sought to curry favor with the incoming administration – including the three richest men in the world, Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg – had prominent seats on stage, next to cabinet nominees and members of Trump’s family.
Trump, the first U.S. president since the 19th century to win a second term after losing the White House, has said he will pardon “on Day One” many of the more than 1,500 people charged in connection with the Jan. 6, 2021, attack. He skipped Biden’s inauguration and has continued to claim falsely that the 2020 election he lost to Biden was rigged.
Biden, in one of his last official acts, pardoned several people whom Trump has targeted for retaliation, including former White House chief medical adviser Anthony Fauci, former Republican U.S. Representative Liz Cheney and former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley.
Trump will restore the federal death penalty, which Biden had suspended, and require that official U.S. documents such as passports reflect citizens’ gender as assigned at birth, incoming administration officials told reporters.
They said he will also sign an order ending diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives in the federal government on Monday, which is also Martin Luther King Jr. Day.
But Trump will not immediately impose new tariffs on Monday, instead directing federal agencies to evaluate trade relationships with Canada, China and Mexico, a Trump official confirmed, an unexpected development that unleashed a broad slide in the U.S. dollar and a rally in global stock markets on a day when U.S. financial markets are closed.
Some of the executive orders are likely to face legal challenges.
Shortly before 10 a.m. ET (1500 GMT), Trump and incoming first lady Melania Trump arrived at the White House, where Biden and outgoing first lady Jill Biden greeted them with handshakes.
“Welcome home,” Biden said.
DISRUPTIVE FORCE
As he did in 2017, Trump enters office as a chaotic and disruptive force, vowing to remake the federal government and expressing deep skepticism about the U.S.-led alliances that have shaped post-World War Two global politics.
The former president returns to Washington emboldened after winning the national popular vote over Harris by more than 2 million votes thanks to a groundswell of voter frustration over persistent inflation, though he still fell just short of a 50% majority.
In 2016, Trump won the Electoral College – and the presidency – despite receiving nearly 3 million fewer votes than Hillary Clinton.
Trump, who surpassed Biden as the oldest president ever to be sworn into office, will enjoy Republican majorities in both chambers of Congress that have been almost entirely purged of any intra-party dissenters. His advisers have outlined plans to replace nonpartisan bureaucrats with hand-picked loyalists.
Even before taking office, Trump established a rival power center in the weeks after his election victory, meeting world leaders and causing consternation by musing aloud about seizing the Panama Canal, taking control of NATO ally Denmark’s territory of Greenland and imposing tariffs on the biggest U.S. trading partners.
REUTERS
