Donald Trump is back and so is America. “For American citizens, Jan. 20, 2025, is Liberation Day,” Trump said Monday after being sworn in as the 47th president of the United States and the first commander in chief since 2017 to possess the cognitive fitness required for the office. “After all we have been through together, we stand on the verge of the four greatest years in American history.”
During his 30-minute Inaugural Address, delivered indoors at the Capitol rotunda due to freezing weather in Washington, D.C., Trump outlined an optimistic vision for the country’s future and vowed to restore the ambition, strength, and sense of adventure that make America exceptional. Naturally, the New York Times described the speech as “grim.”
“From this moment on America’s decline is over,” Trump said, vowing to bring about a “golden age” in which the United States “increases our wealth, expands our territory, builds our cities, raises our expectations, and carries our flag into new and beautiful horizons.” On his watch, America would take back the Panama Canal and pursue “our manifest destiny into the stars” by planting the American flag on Mars.
Trump touted his remarkable political comeback, after overcoming an array of politically motivated prosecutions and surviving two assassination attempts, as an example of the fighting spirit he hoped to revitalize during his second term. “I stand before you now as proof that you should never believe that something is impossible to do,” he said. “In America the impossible is what we do best.” Thousands of supporters, who would have otherwise flocked to the National Mall, watched and cheered from the Capital One Arena, where on Sunday evening Trump held a rally and danced on stage as the Village People sang “Y.M.C.A.”
In the Capitol rotunda, before an audience of cabinet nominees, elected officials, past presidents, foreign leaders, and tech executives, Trump promised to confront the “crisis of trust” in government, which he blamed on the “radical and corrupt establishment,” and to restore “competency” and “common sense.” Former president Joe Biden and former vice president Kamala Harris looked on, but did not join in the numerous standing ovations throughout the address.
Minutes before Trump was sworn in, the White House announced that the outgoing president had pardoned five additional members of his family in a final brazen act of disregard for the rule of law. He also issued a series of preemptive pardons to some of Trump’s perceived enemies, including former Rep. Liz Cheney (R., Wyo.) and Dr. Anthony Fauci, who was granted clemency “for any offenses against the United States which he may have committed or taken part in” dating back to Jan. 1, 2014. Harris, meanwhile, was plotting to make history by flying back to Los Angeles with the first “all-female crew” to operate a C-33 military aircraft.
Trump outlined a number of the executive actions he planned to sign Monday afternoon during a special ceremony at the Capital One Arena. The majority would address the illegal immigration crisis at the southern border. A national emergency would soon be declared, and American troops deployed to “repel the disastrous invasion of our country.” Mexican drug cartels would be designated as “foreign terrorist organizations.”
The incoming administration, Trump said, would begin at once to roll back government censorship and “bring back free speech to America,” and put a stop to all programs designed to “socially engineer race and gender into every aspect of public and private life” in order to promote a “colorblind and merit-based” society while striving to realize the dream articulated by Martin Luther King Jr. Trump declared that government policy would henceforth reflect the fact that “there are only two genders: male and female.”
Trump promised to deliver “a new spirit of unity to a world that has been angry, violent, and totally unpredictable,” and said the nation was “rapidly unifying” behind his agenda, as evidenced by the “dramatic increases in support from virtually every element of our society.”
“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,” Trump concluded. “We are going to win like never before.”
At least one prominent Democrat was also feeling optimistic about America’s future. Former House speaker Nancy Pelosi reported making a series of bullish stock trades ahead of Trump’s inauguration. Biden was also surprisingly cheerful prior to the ceremony. “Welcome home!” he said upon greeting Trump and his wife at the White House, an unusual thing for Biden to say to someone he repeatedly denounced as an existential “threat to democracy.” Most Democratic politicians also declined to boycott the swearing-in of a president they previously likened to Adolf Hitler.
Tim Miller, the anti-Trump media personality, suggested Biden should have told Trump to “eat a dick,” an example of how childish and irrelevant the so-called #Resistance has become. Meanwhile, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D., N.Y.) ranted on social media about how America was “on the eve of an authoritarian administration” and would be skipping the inauguration, along with former first lady Michelle Obama, because she refused to “celebrate rapists.”
Biden, who leaves office in disgrace, is reportedly still fuming about being forced to withdraw from the 2024 election. CNN’s MJ Lee reported Monday that Biden has grown “increasingly embittered” by the accusations from Democrats that he is primarily to blame for Trump’s return to the White House, and “never really stopped feeling angry about the fact that he believes he was forced out.”
Now that Trump is president, American greatness isn’t the only thing that will soon be restored on his watch. Staffers are working quickly to reinstall his iconic “Diet Coke button” on the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office.
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