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by Vox Staff
Donald J. Trump and JD Vance were officially sworn in as the 47th president and vice president of the United States on Monday, January 20, 2025, in Washington, DC. Their inauguration looks different from previous years, in part because it is being held inside the Capitol Rotunda, instead of outside the US Capitol, as a polar vortex threatens much of the nation with below freezing temperatures.
Trump is expected to issue hundreds of executive orders as soon as he is inaugurated for his second presidency, including vows to impose tariffs on imported goods and to carry out a mass deportation effort. (How Trump plans to carry out these plans remains unclear.) He also pledged to provide “major pardons” for the roughly hundreds of nonviolent defendants convicted of storming the US Capitol on January 6, 2021.
Follow here for the latest news, analysis, and explainers about Inauguration Day.
Naveena Sadasivam and Joseph Winters
This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
Within hours of being sworn into office on Monday, President Donald Trump announced a spate of executive orders and policies to boost oil and gas production, roll back environmental protections, withdraw from the Paris climate accord, and undo environmental justice initiatives enacted by former President Joe Biden.
Ian Millhiser
On Monday, his first day back in office, President Donald Trump issued a wave of executive orders.
Some are ridiculous, such as an order purporting to rename the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America.” Others are ominous, such as an order seeking to drastically increase the number of federal civil servants who can be fired at will. Many of the orders seek to implement the kind of harsh immigration policies that have always been at the heart of Trump’s political message.
Andrew Prokop
The dizzying array of executive actions President Donald Trump issued on Monday, the first day of his second term, show that he is increasingly willing to push the envelope, challenging both laws and norms in an effort to get the government to do what he wants.
His pardons of January 6 rioters are far more sweeping than many predicted. His immigration actions go much further than those he took in his first term, some in ways that seem blatantly illegal. And he laid the groundwork to push out many federal government employees who he thinks might get in his way.
Eric Levitz
Donald Trump has never been on better terms with corporate America. Yet his ostensible trade agenda has never been more antithetical to the interests of big business.
In recent weeks, tech billionaires who’d once projected ambivalence (if not hostility) toward Trump — including Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, and Bill Gates — have paid him their respects at Mar-a-Lago. The world’s wealthiest entrepreneur, Elon Musk, has become the new president’s righthand man. And Trump’s pick for treasury secretary, hedge fund manager Scott Bessent, won wide applause within the financial industry.
Christian Paz
Standing in the Capitol Rotunda on Monday, President Donald Trump captured the vibes buoying Republicans — and the American right writ large — as he promised a lengthy list of crackdowns and policy reversals.
“My recent election is a mandate to completely and totally reverse a horrible betrayal,” Trump said. “As our victory showed, the entire nation is rapidly unifying behind our agenda, with dramatic increases in support from virtually every element of our society.”
Zack Beauchamp
Ever since Donald Trump declared he’d act like a dictator on Day 1 during his presidential campaign, there have been real concerns that he’d be true to his word — that he’d take a series of unilateral actions that threaten the integrity of American democracy.
With Trump’s Inauguration Day in the rearview mirror, we’re in a position to assess just how justified those fears were. Four specific moves — illegally attempting to end birthright citizenship, reviving the Schedule F order that could initiate a civil service purge, pardoning January 6 rioters, and ordering multiple investigations into the Biden administration — deserve particular attention.
Zack Beauchamp
When it comes to speeches, there are two Donald Trumps. The first is Teleprompter Trump, who reads a prepared speech and tends to be staid, sleepy, and insincere. The second is Rally Trump, who riffs in front of a cheering crowd and is wild, aggressive, and more true to the person that Trump really is.
We saw this duality on display immediately after Trump’s inauguration.
Patrick Reis and Christian Paz
It’s Inauguration Day for President Trump, and our newsroom is preparing for what is sure to be an eventful four years. While our mission remains the same — to cut through the noise and explain the news — our newsroom is thoughtfully taking stock of lessons learned from Trump’s first presidency and looking toward what lies ahead.
Earlier on Monday, in an exclusive chat for Vox Members, senior editor Patrick Reis and senior reporter Christian Paz discuss how they’re thinking about news coverage in this second Trump presidency and the lessons we can learn from his first term in office.
Avishay Artsy and Noel King
It’s a very cold day in the District of Columbia. The frigid temperatures have prompted the inauguration of Donald Trump and JD Vance to be moved into the US Capitol Rotunda.
But that’s not all that’s changed between this day and Trump’s inauguration eight years ago.
Sigal Samuel
There’s a dominant narrative in the media about why tech billionaires are sucking up to Donald Trump: Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and Jeff Bezos, all of whom have descended on the nation’s capital for the presidential inauguration, either happily support or have largely acquiesced to Trump because they think he’ll offer lower taxes and friendlier regulations. In other words, it’s just about protecting their own selfish business interests.
That narrative is not exactly wrong — Trump has in fact promised massive tax cuts for billionaires — but it leaves out the deeper, darker forces at work here. For the tech bros — or as some say, the broligarchs — this is about much more than just maintaining and growing their riches. It’s about ideology. An ideology inspired by science fiction and fantasy. An ideology that says they are supermen, and supermen should not be subject to rules, because they’re doing something incredibly important: remaking the world in their image.
Sean Collins
President-elect Donald Trump is set to become President Donald Trump — again. And he’s made a lot of promises about what he’s going to do with his executive power.
On immigration, he’s said he’d like to enact mass deportations and end birthright citizenship (which is constitutionally protected), among other things. He’s made grand pledges on foreign policy, telling Americans he can solve the war in Ukraine as easily as you might open a bag of chips. He’s said he’ll reshape our (and the world) economy with sweeping tariffs. And his allies have hinted at even more unorthodox actions as well, including moves that could gut the federal workforce and classify Mexican cartels as terrorist groups.
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