Donald J. Trump — a native of Queens now residing in Florida — officially became the 47th President of the United States at noon Monday in a ceremony in the Capitol rotunda.
Trump is only the second president in U.S. history to be elected to two non-consecutive terms to the White House, the first being Grover Cleveland, the 22nd and 24th presidents.
Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts, as he had done eight years earlier, administered the presidential oath of office to Trump at midday on Jan. 20, with Trump’s wife, First Lady Melania Trump, holding the Bible. Due to the cold weather, the ceremony was moved inside the Capitol rather than at the traditional inauguration location on the outside steps.
President Trump’s inauguration comes after four tumultuous years in which he was criminally indicted four times — including for his alleged role in inciting the Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection on the U.S. Capitol — and a conviction in a Manhattan court on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records, to which he received no sentence.
Defeating former Vice President Kamala Harris last November, Trump was elected on a campaign of instituting tariffs on imported goods, cutting costs, cracking down on illegal immigration and, in some ways, seeking retribution. Ahead of his inauguration, he sought to eliminate birthright citizenship for Americans born to undocumented parents via executive order — a move that will likely face court challenges.
Though he handily lost New York state, where he had spent much of his life, Trump seemed to win over more city voters in the 2024 presidential election — as more New Yorkers seemed motivated by economic and public safety concerns.
Despite inheriting the strongest peacetime economy on Earth, Trump alleged that America was in decline — but that he would turn things around by putting “America first.”
In his inaugural address, Trump claimed that he would make America “greater, stronger, and far more exceptional than ever before,” and outlined a number of executive orders he would sign Monday to close the southern border, invoke the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 “to eliminate the presence of all foreign gangs and criminal networks bringing devastating crime to U.S. soil,” declare a national energy emergency and expand oil drilling.
Trump also said would also “forge a society that is colorblind and merit-based,” and declared that the U.S. government’s policy was to recognize only two genders, a move that effectively disenfranchised transgender and binary Americans.
The new president also doubled down on previous statements that he would seek to rename the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America; restore the name of Mount McKinley to the highest peak in America in Alaska (which native Americans have called Denali for centuries); take back the Panama Canal, which the U.S. ceded to Panama in a 1999 agreement; create an “External Revenue Service” to collect tariffs on imported goods; and plant the American flag on Mars.
Meanwhile, earlier on Monday, J.D. Vance of Ohio was sworn in as vice president, succeeding Harris.
