Trending Now
We have updated our Privacy Policy and Terms of Use for Eurasia Group and its affiliates, including GZERO Media, to clarify the types of data we collect, how we collect it, how we use data and with whom we share data. By using our website you consent to our Terms and Conditions and Privacy Policy, including the transfer of your personal data to the United States from your country of residence, and our use of cookies described in our Cookie Policy.
{{ subpage.title }}
Washington , DC - January 20: President-elect Donald Trump arrives ahead of the 60th inaugural ceremony on January 20, 2025, at the US Capitol in Washington, DC. Trump becomes the 47th president of the United States in a rare indoor inauguration ceremony. The parade was also moved inside Capitol One Arena due to weather.
Trump’s 2025 Inaugural: From American Carnage to Golden Age
“Nothing will stand in our way. The future is ours and our golden age has just begun.”
With those words, President Donald J. Trump concluded his 2025 inaugural address, promising an American renaissance. Invoking the doctrine of American exceptionalism, he declared that “We are going to win like never before” and pledged to be a unifier and peacemaker who would nonetheless put America First.
A shift in tone. The speech was a stark contrast to Trump’s inaugural address of 2017, where he painted a gloomy picture of “American carnage”: a nation riddled with crime, poverty, and economic decline. This time, while he heavily criticized the previous administration for its decisions, Trump adopted a more optimistic and forward-looking tone, emphasizing unity and national restoration – and even territorial expansion. Trump invoked the concept of Manifest Destiny, promising to plant the American flag on Mars, as well as rename the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America” and retake the Panama Canal.
Border Security and Immigration. Trump will declare a national emergency at America’s southern border (which earned him one of several standing ovations), reinstate his “Remain in Mexico” policy, and designate drug cartels as foreign terrorist organizations. He also pledged to use the Enemy Aliens act of 1798 to deploy military power to eliminate foreign gangs in American cities.
Health and Wealth. Trump promised to “end the chronic disease epidemic” but gave no further specifics. On the prosperity front, he promised to restore America’s strength in manufacturing and that his cabinet would “marshal powers to defeat inflation and bring down costs and prices”, which he said were caused by government overspending and high energy prices.
Drill baby drill. To that end, Trump promised to overturn President Joe Biden’s Green New Deal and expand the exploitation of oil and gas resources, which he dubbed the “liquid gold beneath our feet” that America should export. He spoke of tariffs, but without specifics, promising to create an External Revenue Service to collect all tariffs duties and revenues, as well as a department of government efficiency to cut spending.
Woke wars. Trump promised to sign an executive order to “stop all government censorship”, “bring back free speech to America” and create a society that is “colour blind and merit based.” He declared that the United States has only two genders, male and female.
The military. Trump promised to restore back pay to servicemen who had lost their jobs for refusing the federal COVID vaccine mandate. He pledged to remove “radical theories” from the military and leave it “free to focus on its sole mission – defeating America’s enemies.”
From Davos: How global leaders are grappling with Trump’s return
Ian Bremmer's Quick Take: A Quick Take to kick off your week.
I am standing here at the World Economic Forum's annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland. And of course, it's a split screen right now because everyone's also got their eyes back on Washington, DC and the inauguration for the second time of Donald Trump as president. It is the end of the post-Cold War order. That's what Borge Brende said, he runs the World Economic Forum, in a piece in the New York Times. I call it the G-Zero world, but this is the organization that's most committed to that order over the last 50 years. And of course, committed to doesn't necessarily mean fighting for. I think that's part of the issue, is that so many people, whether they were captains of industry, or media leaders, or heads of state, just believe that, well, after the Soviet Union was defeated, a united, more multilateral, globalized order was just what was coming.
And so, we didn't have to do anything. We just had to keep on keeping on. Of course, that isn't the way it felt for an awful lot of people living inside those countries. And the Americans definitively elected Trump not just once, but twice. And the first time, it was an experiment. He was an outsider to shake things up. The second time, you're electing somebody who's already been impeached twice, who's been convicted for crimes, who's already made very clear that he has no interest in promoting a US-led multilateral order. And that is exactly what people wanted, or at least, more people than wanted the alternative. And so that's where we are.
Outside of the United States, and Davos is mostly about other countries, 60 heads of state are here, and CEOs from all over the world, it’s really a question of how are you responding to that? And I would say that there's a big question of whether or not you accept it and normalize and capitulate, or whether you try to fight. And overwhelmingly, what we have is the former. I mean, the number of times you're talking about things that you never would have found acceptable, a year ago, five years ago, from the United States, cryptocurrencies being launched by the president in the days before his inauguration, making billions, tens of billions of dollars, that's just the way it's done in the United States now. Elon Musk joining phone calls and meetings with CEOs and heads of state. Really bizarre if that was happening with any other leader. But if the United States is doing it, I guess that's just the way it's done. And if the Americans are telling you we're going to take Greenland or we're going to take Canada, we're going to take the Panama Canal, well, we're not going to take that seriously, but we do recognize that we're going to have to give them a little something, because otherwise it's going to cause us a lot of damage.
One major exception here is that I don't expect the Chinese to capitulate at all. I mean, they're talking with the Americans, and maybe there will even be a meeting in the early days, a summit meeting between Donald Trump and XI Jinping. That's very different from a breakthrough deal. And rather, I think we’re at the beginning of what's very likely to be a trade war between the two largest economies in the world. And frankly, of all the things I just mentioned, that's probably the one that is going to concern the attendees of the World Economic Forum the most. Certainly, the one that's going to affect them most.
Anyway, that's where we're starting off with the summit this week. There'll be massive number of meetings over the course of the next few days and I'm sure I'll talk to you again. Talk soon.
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 who had planned to attend, Trump announced that the Capital One Arena would host a live viewing event. But many who traveled long distances for the event were disappointed by the decision. Most ticketholders have been told they are now unable to attend.
Thousands also marched in DC this weekend, advocating for causes they believe are threatened by the incoming administration, such as women’s reproductive rights.
High-profile guests 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.
Monday's inauguration will also be the first to be attended by foreign leaders, including Vice President Han Zheng, Argentine President Javier Milei, and Italian Premier Giorgia Meloni.
Opera tenor Christopher Macchio is set to sign the national anthem at the inauguration. Country stars Carrie Underwood and Lee Greenwood are also set to perform.
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 scores of executive orders that will set the tone for his administration. They will likely include measures to tighten immigration policy drastically, 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.
Trump is expected, for example, to reverse federal government Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion policies, and remove some of Biden's gender-related executive orders. At a rally this weekend, Trump said he plans to take action to “keep men out of women's sports.”
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, and country stars Jason Aldean and Billy Ray Cyrus, will perform.