
"January 20th 2025 is liberation day", declared Donald J. Trump this evening, as he was sworn in as 47th US President, marking a seismic day for American - and world - politics.
All living former US presidents - including Barack Obama, George W. Bush and Bill Clinton - were in attendance at Capitol Hill today, to watch Trump - a man once thought to have been banished into irrelevance - sworn in again as leader of the free world, following his decisive November victory.
Other attendees at the 60th US Presidential Inauguration included Italy’s Giorgia Meloni, Hungary’s Viktor Orbán and Argentina’s radical libertarian leader, Javier Milei, whose efforts to “take a chainsaw to the state” will no doubt act as inspiration for Elon Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency”, as he seeks to dismantle the “deep state” so despised by Trump by firing large numbers of federal employees.
Brits to make an appearance in Washington today included Boris Johnson, Liz Truss, Nigel Farage and even Laurence Fox. Boris made it into the Rotunda itself. An invitation was not extended to Keir Starmer though Foreign Secretary David Lammy has indicated that Starmer - who has reportedly set up a “mini cabinet” to work on securing a trade deal with the US - will visit Washington to meet Trump within weeks.
Trump used his speech today to start announcing some of the executive actions he will take now that he's president, as he declared "the golden age of America begins right now”.
The main themes came as no surprise.
On the immigration front, he vowed to sign executive orders declaring a national emergency at the US-Mexico border and “designating the cartels as foreign terrorist organisations".
He also announced plans to declare a “national energy emergency”, repeating his pledge to ramp up drilling of oil and gas on US soil and to “revoke an electric vehicle mandate".
On the tariffs front, he vowed to “immediately begin the overhaul of our trade system to protect American workers and families”. Though he did not mention any specific executive orders to whack giant tariffs on Canada, Mexico, China or European nations.
Further details on Trump’s blitz of executive orders can be found here.
There is every reason to believe Trump’s second stint in power will be more radical than the first.
For starters, because of the scale of his election victory. Many of his planned policies, such as major tax cuts for corporations, require approval from Congress to be enacted. But, given he has a majority in both chambers, that shouldn’t be too difficult for Trump.
That the incoming President has filled his cabinet with loyalists - free from the moderating forces who he accuses of undermining him during his previous stint in office - is another indicator that Trump 2.0 will be more unbridled.
And yet it is striking that, despite the potential for a much more consequential second presidency, resistance against Trump appears far less energised this time round.
Organisers of an anti-Trump protest in Washington over the weekend had hoped that some 50,000 people might show up; around 5,000 did. Back in 2017, Trump struggled to find high-profile musicians willing to take part in his inauguration. This year, a long list have performed at the celebrations, from country star Carrie Underwood at today’s Ceremony to former Trump critic Snoop Dogg at the inauguration-affiliated Crypto Ball.
The realignment amongst US tech billionaires is equally striking. Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and even his bosom buddy Elon Musk were all open critics of Trump during his first term. Today, all three men were happily sat in the VIP section watching Trump’s inaugural address.
Zuckerberg’s U-turn is particularly revealing, and lends some weight to Trump’s brag last month that: “Everybody wants to be my friend”. Four years ago, the Meta CEO went as far as to ban the then outgoing President from Facebook and Instagram following the Capitol riots, prompting Trump to later label Facebook "an enemy of the people". Come 2025 and Zuckerberg has just scrapped independent fact-checkers on all Meta platforms, in a major policy upheaval. As I wrote at the time, when explaining why he would once again be prioritising free speech, over making efforts to reduce harmful content circulating online, Zuckerberg admitted this was down to Trump’s influence: “The recent elections feel like a cultural tipping point”, he reasoned.
Even before his formal return to the Oval Office, Trump’s second presidency has already been a consequential one, with no shortage of examples of the power he yields.
Yesterday, a ceasefire and hostage release deal between Israel and Hamas finally came into force. Anonymous Arab officials have briefed that Steve Witkoff, Trump’s pick for Middle East envoy, a real estate mogul with no background in diplomacy, did “more in a single sit-down to sway Netanyahu” to agree to a deal “than outgoing President Biden did all year”. Hence Trump boasting today of being a "peacemaker and unifier".
None of this is to say that things couldn’t still go very wrong for Trump, in spite of his stonking election victory. There is, for instance, no shortage of economists warning that tariffs on imported goods could see US inflation soar again, or that Trump’s hugely expensive mass deportation plans - aside from raising obvious human rights concerns - will be detrimental to the economy and lead to big labour shortages.
While his popularity could still take a hammering further down the line, as Iain Martin writes in his latest newsletter for Reaction subscribers, Trump’s inauguration undeniably ushers in “a very high risk new era of American hegemony and domination”. The cultural impact of which “will ripple out in waves across the West and beyond”.
Caitlin Allen
Deputy Editor
ON REACTION TODAY
Iain Martin
Trump triumphant means a high risk new era of intensifying American hegemony
Ian Stewart
The global economy in 2025
Gerald Warner
The revolution starts today, with Starmer on the losing side
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