President Trump was inaugurated for the second time Monday afternoon, becoming one of just two U.S. presidents to return to the White House, after losing reelection four years earlier.
“The golden age of America begins right now,” Trump declared in his inaugural address. “We will not allow ourselves to be taken advantage of any longer.”
Here are three takeaways from Trump’s first day back in office.
A new ‘Manifest Destiny’?
Flanked by former President Joe Biden and former Vice President Kamala Harris, his vanquished 2024 election opponents, Trump did not shy away in his speech from criticizing the country’s outgoing leadership or touting his “powerful win” over them last November — a break with inaugural tradition, which typically finds new presidents looking forward rather than backward in their first remarks to the nation.
Yet unlike in 2017, when Trump at length dwelled on the “American carnage” of “rusted-out factories, scattered like tombstones across the landscape,” the returning president this time pivoted quickly to what he promised would be “a thrilling new era of national success.”
In doing so, he framed his own “historic political comeback” as “proof that you should never believe something is impossible to do.”
“Over the past eight years I have been tested and challenged more than any other president in our 250-year history,” Trump claimed. “In America, the impossible is what we do best.”
To convey a sense of “ambition” for his second term, Trump evoked Manifest Destiny — the 19th-century idea that American settlers would inevitably expand westward across the continent — at every turn: to “plant the Stars and Stripes on the planet Mars”; to “take back” the Panama Canal; to rechristen the Gulf of Mexico as “the Gulf of America”; to change the name of Alaska’s Denali back to Mt. McKinley.
“The United States will once again consider itself a growing nation — one that increases our wealth, expands our territory, builds our cities, raises our expectations and carries our flag into new and beautiful horizons,” Trump said.
How much destiny Trump actually manifests in his second term remains to be seen. But as he’s done strategically throughout his career in business and politics, he’s already aiming big — and talking tough — as a way of intimidating adversaries, influencing negotiations and shaping the narrative in the weeks and months ahead.
The ‘resistance’ retreats
In 2017, nearly 600,000 progressives descended on Washington, D.C., to protest Trump’s first inauguration — the largest single-day public demonstration in American history. It was the start of the so-called resistance. Tech titans were wary of the new president. Even the Republican establishment — led by House Speaker Paul Ryan — wasn’t entirely sold.
The mood on Monday couldn’t have been more different. Over the last eight years, Trump has remade the GOP in his own MAGA image. Most conservatives who defied him — Ryan, Utah Sen. Mitt Romney, Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney — are gone. Silicon Valley tycoons such as Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg flocked to the capital after adjusting their companies’ policies to align with the new administration. There were progressive protests, to be sure, but they were tiny in comparison to 2017’s. Democrats largely accepted Trump’s popular-vote victory rather than railing against it.
“Focusing all of [our] energy on one man failed to make the difference,” Donna Brazile, a former Democratic National Committee chairwoman, acknowledged to the New York Times. “It’s a bitter pill to swallow, but it’s not the end. We shall rebuild. The resistance to Trumpism … will show up differently during Trump 2.0.”
For now, at least, it’s a lot quieter than it was before.
A flurry of executive orders
Speaking later Monday afternoon to supporters at the Capitol visitors’ center, Trump revealed that Vance and first lady Melania Trump had convinced him not to mention certain “things” in his inaugural address — chief among them his plan to pardon people convicted of committing crimes during the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the very building in which he stood.
“But you’ll be happy,” Trump added, “because you know it’s action, not words, that count. And you’ll see a lot of action.”
Soon after, the president appeared center stage at Washington’s Capital One Arena and started to sign “a series of historic executive orders” representing the “complete restoration of America and a revolution of common sense,” as he characterized them during his inaugural address.
Trump spent much of Monday’s big speech ticking through these executive orders one by one — another unusual move on a day typically reserved for lofty themes rather than State of the Union-style laundry lists.
But Trump’s focus on policy underscored how serious he is about making immediate changes this time around.
Among the orders Trump signed at Capital One arena:
- Revoking 78 executive actions of the previous administration
- Issuing “an immediate regulation freeze” and “a temporary hiring freeze” until Republicans have full control of the government
- Pausing the hiring of “any new IRS agents”
- Requiring “federal workers to return to the office in person”
- Signing “a presidential memorandum directing every member of my cabinet to … defeat inflation and bring down the cost of everyday life”
- Withdrawing from the Paris climate treaty
- Directing the federal government to preserve free speech and avoid political persecutions of prior administrations
“Can you imagine Biden doing this?” Trump asked the audience. “I don’t think so.”
Among the orders Trump said he would sign later in the Oval Office:
- Pardoning Jan. 6 defendants
- Declaring a “national emergency” at America’s southern border and “send[ing] troops” there to halt “all illegal entry” and “begin the process of returning millions and millions” of immigrants who entered the country illegally “back to the places from which they came”
- Designating drug cartels as “foreign terrorist organizations” and invoking the Alien Enemies Act of 1978 to “eliminate the presence of all foreign gangs and criminal networks”
- Declaring a “national energy emergency” to vastly expand domestic drilling and undo the Biden Administration’s electric vehicle incentives
- Overhauling America’s “trade system” in order to “tax and tariff foreign countries” via an “External Revenue Service”
- Reinstating military service members who “objected to the COVID [vaccine] mandate with full back pay”
- Ending diversity, equity and inclusion programs inside federal agencies
- Eliminating various protections for transgender Americans, including the ability to select the gender-neutral “X” as a marker on their passports
“As of today, it will henceforth be the policy of the United States government that there are only two genders,” Trump said in his inaugural address. “Male and female.”
