After four years out of power, Donald Trump is back in the White House.
Trump, who served as the 45th President of the United States between 2017 and 2021, was sworn in today as the 47th president, two-and-a-half months after his close but definitive victory over Vice President Kamala Harris in the 2024 election. In his inaugural address, he painted a portrait of America as a troubled nation in decline – a decline that he is capable of reversing.
“The Golden Age of America begins right now,” Trump said. “From this day forward, our country will flourish and be respected again all over the world. We will be the envy of every nation, and we will not allow ourselves to be taken advantage of any longer. During every single day of the Trump administration, I will, very simply, put America First.”
From his first day in office, Trump said, he will work to undo the policies of now-former President Joe Biden – whose victory over Trump in the 2020 election prompted an attack on the Capitol by Trump supporters who refused to acknowledge their champion’s defeat – and take the country back from a “radical and corrupt establishment.” To do so, Trump said he will immediately sign a number of executive orders authorizing gas drilling, ending diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, stepping up immigration enforcement, and more.
“As commander in chief, I have no higher responsibility than to defend our country from threats and invasions, and that is exactly what I am going to do,” he said. “We will do it at a level that nobody has ever seen before.”
Trump, the first president since Grover Cleveland to serve non-consecutive terms, also cast himself as a man under attack, one who had survived a number of tribulations on his path back to the White House. Trump was the subject of a number of criminal charges and was convicted last year in a hush money case, making him the first U.S. president to be convicted of a felony; he also survived an assassination attempt while campaigning last summer.
“Over the past eight years, I have been tested and challenged more than any president in our 250-year history, and I have learned a lot along the way,” Trump said. “The journey to reclaim our republic has not been an easy one, that I can tell you. Those who wish to stop our cause have tried to take my freedom, and indeed, to take my life.”
Within the Republican Party, which started out as highly skeptical of Trump during his first campaign in 2016 but which has steadily become an unerringly pro-Trump party, Trump’s return to office has been greeted with nothing but enthusiasm. Republicans flipped the U.S. Senate last year and very narrowly retained control of the House, giving them a full trifecta in Washington for 2025.
“Today is a new day in America,” Rep. Jeff Van Drew (R-Dennis), a former Democrat who switched parties in 2019 in support of Trump, said on social media. “Welcome back, Mr. President.”
Democrats, meanwhile, have largely reacted to Trump’s win with caution and introspection, a big change from the “resistance”-focused language following Trump’s first victory in 2016.
“Donald Trump will take the oath today because the status quo simply isn’t working for most people,” Senator Andy Kim said in a statement. “The mandate for change isn’t just his, but everyone who swears an oath to public service… Our job isn’t to score political points, but to make sure that the change we make brings a new status quo that works for everyone. I’m ready to get to work.”
That more circumspect tone is in part the result of Trump’s relatively decisive victory; the president won all seven key swing states as well as the popular vote, the first Republican to do so since 2004. And Trump’s surge was especially stark in New Jersey, where he lost by only six percentage points – the smallest Democratic margin since 1992 – and made massive inroads in the state’s diverse Democratic bastions. (Then again, Trump is the first major-party presidential nominee to lose New Jersey thrice since William Jennings Bryan at the turn of the 20th century.)
Since every year is an election year in New Jersey, the state’s Republicans and Democrats alike are already gearing up for what’s shaping up to be a bruising fight this year for the open governor’s office and all 80 seats in the State Assembly. Those campaigns, featuring many notable contenders on both sides of the aisle, will happen in the shadow of Trump’s first year in office.
If history is any guide, that might be good news for Democrats, since the party that won the White House tends to do poorly in the New Jersey elections that immediately follow. (When Gov. Phil Murphy narrowly won re-election in 2021, he was the first New Jersey gubernatorial candidate since 1985 to win when a member of their own party was president.)
But in the meantime, national Republicans will begin the second Trump administration as powerful as they’ve been decades, and Trump said he intends to use the full extent of the mandate he and his party have been given.
“If we work together, there is nothing we cannot do, and no dream we cannot achieve. Many people thought it was impossible for me to stage such a historic political comeback, but as we see today, here I am: the American people have spoken,” Trump said. “To every parent who dreams for their child, and every child who dreams for their future, I am with you, I will fight for you, and I will win for you. We’re going to win like never before.”
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