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21-01-2025
WASHINGTON: Donald Trump has been sworn in for a second term as president of the United States at noon local time (17:00 GMT) in Washington, DC.
Trump used his inaugural address to reiterate his grievances against his political opponents, saying he would “liberate” the country from a “radical and corrupt establishment”.
His speech also previewed the slate of executive actions he planned to take in the coming days, including declaring a state of emergency at the southern border with Mexico.
Trump, the first US president convicted of criminal charges, also denounced the “weaponisation” of the justice system, though he himself has threatened to jail political opponents.
His speech has also drawn international backlash, as Trump announced once again the US is “taking back” the Panama Canal, part of Panama’s territory.
The gloves have come off completely.
At the podium at the Capital One Arena, Trump has reverted to his pugilistic campaign-trail style, throwing punches at the outgoing administration of Democrat Joe Biden.
“We’re going to sign executive orders,” Trump said, referring to a pile of documents nearby.
“First, I’ll revoke nearly 80 disruptive and radical executive actions of the previous administration, one of the worst administrations in history not one of them. The worst. Anybody would allow millions of people to pour through our borders from jails, prisons, mental institutions, insane asylums…”
There is no evidence to support that foreign countries are releasing people from prisons or mental health institutions into US borders.
Even as he celebrates his first day in office, Trump has returned to his usual grievances, once again accusing his political opponents of trying to “rig” the election.
It was a throwback to Trump’s previous claims that his 2020 defeat was the result of widespread voter fraud.
For the 2024 race, he called on his supporters to turn out en masse, using the slogan “Too big to rig”, a phrase he reprised on the floor of the Capital One Arena on Monday.
“They worked so hard,” Trump said of his daughter-in-law Lara Trump, who formerly headed the Republican National Committee. “They knew they’d be rigging, but they said we’re going to make it too big to rank” and “we did. We made it too big to rig. We won every swing state by a lot. We won the popular vote by millions and millions of votes. We won the whole ball of wax and now we’re going to go and drill, baby, drill and do all the things that we wanted to do.”
“We won! We won, but now the work begins.”
Trump declared that, later on Monday evening, he would begin signing pardons for the rioters arrested after the attack on the US Capitol on January 6, 2021.
“Tonight, I’m going to be signing the J6 hostages’ pardons to get them out,” Trump said and “as soon as I leave, I’m going to the Oval Office and we’ll be signing pardons for a lot of people.”
As of January 6 of this year, the Justice Department had charged 1,583 people with federal crimes related to the riot. Approximately 1,009 people have pleaded guilty, and 221 have been found guilty.
In his remarks, Witkoff, Trump’s envoy to the Middle East echoed many of Trump’s talking points, including the idea that foreign allies were relying too heavily on US aid “we are done carrying the financial burden for nations that are unwilling to fund their own progress. The days of blank cheques are over,” Witkoff said. (Int’l News Desk)
