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President-elect Donald Trump’s silhouette is seen against a United States flag at a campaign rally in October 2024.
Inauguration Day: Donald Trump Returns
At noon on Monday, Donald Trump will be inaugurated as the 47th president of the United States. The moment will cap an astounding political comeback, and start the clock on what promises to be one of the most contentious and transformative presidential terms in modern American history.
What to expect: Trump and his Vice President J.D. Vance will be sworn in at noon, in the Capitol rotunda, by Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts. After that, Trump will deliver his inaugural address.
The decision to move the event indoors, a break with the modern tradition of holding it on the Capitol steps, was taken on Friday in anticipation of bitterly cold weather on Inauguration Day. This is the first time the inauguration has been held indoors since Ronald Reagan did the same, in 1985, also due to cold weather.
To accommodate some of the 200,000 people expected to attend, Trump announced that the Capital One Arena would host a live viewing event.
High-profile attendees will likely include former President Barack Obama (but not his wife Michelle), former President George W. Bush and his wife Laura Bush, as well as tech billionaires Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg and, notably, TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew, whose company will be officially banned in the US starting on Sunday. GZERO’s Tracy Moran will also be in the crowd.
Country stars Carrie Underwood and Lee Greenwood are set to perform at the swearing-in ceremony.
The speech: The last time Trump stepped up to that podium, in January 2017, he delivered one of the darkest presidential addresses in US history, describing a landscape of “American Carnage.” This time, he is expected to sound lighter and more unifying themes, although Trump enjoys an adlib as much as anyone, so anything is possible.
Order(s) of the day: After that, he’ll head to his new (but old) digs at the White House, where he is expected to sign dozens of executive orders that will set the tone for his administration.
They will likely include measures to drastically tighten immigration policy, loosen restrictions on energy production, scrap US climate policy commitments, withdraw from the WHO, shrink the federal bureaucracy, and remove what Trump views as “woke” ideas on diversity in hiring at federal agencies and institutions.
Then, it’s party time: In the evening, Trump will attend three big inaugural balls, where musical groups including The Village People and Rascal Flatts, as well as country star Jason Aldean, will perform. Meanwhile, Trump’s “AI Czar” David Sacks will host the first-ever “Crypto Ball,” where Snoop Dogg is expected to do a brief set.