2 weeks Ago
WASHINGTON: Donald Trump will be sworn in as US 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 US on the world stage. Trump's inauguration completes a triumphant comeback for a political disrupter who survived two impeachment trials, a felony conviction, two assassination attempts and an indictment for attempting to overturn his 2020 election loss. The ceremony will take place at noon (1700GMT) inside the Rotunda of the US Capitol, four years after a mob of Trump supporters breached the symbol of American democracy in an unsuccessful effort to forestall the Republican Trump's 2020 defeat to Democrat Joe Biden.
The swearing-in was moved indoors for the first time in 40 years due to the extreme cold. Trump, the first US 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 January 6, 2021, attack. That promise is among a flurry of executive actions concerning immigration, energy and tariffs that Trump intends to sign as soon as Monday after taking the oath of office.
At a campaign-style rally on Sunday in Washington, Trump vowed to impose harsh immigration restrictions on his first day. As he did in 2017, Trump enters office as a chaotic and disruptive force, vowing to remake the federal government and expressing deep scepticism about the US-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 Vice President Kamala 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. Jeremi Suri, a presidential historian at the University of Texas at Austin, compared the present era to the late 19th century, when Grover Cleveland became the only other president to win non-consecutive terms. Like now, he said, that was a time of upheaval, as industrial advances transformed the economy, wealth inequality exploded and the proportion of immigrant Americans reached a historical peak.
"What we're really talking about is a fundamentally different economy, a fundamentally different country in terms of its racial and gender and social makeup, and we are as a country struggling to figure out what that means," he said. "It's an existential moment." Trump 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 centre 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 US trading partners..
