President Trump after his inauguration Monday pardoned 1,500 defendants of the January 6th attack of the US capitol, including rioters who attacked police. This included members of Oath Keepers and of Proud Boys, among them former national chair Enrique Tarrio, who was sentenced to 22 years for helping plot the insurrection, the AP reports.
By Todd Lassa
Donald J. Trump’s second official inauguration speech seemed a slight bit less-dark than it was eight years earlier, perhaps because it was held inside the Capitol Rotunda and thus no outdoor crowd for the new president to point to and declare the biggest ever in the history of inaugurations. Perhaps like the youngest of voters who have known little more than of Trump as the central political figure in their lives, we’re becoming accustomed to his style. Perhaps it was because Hilary Clinton laughed visibly when Trump declared he is renaming the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America.”
No mention so far of Greenland.
“The Golden Age of America begins right now,” Trump said, adding that the United States will “flourish and be respected all over the world. … I will, simply put, put America first.”
The US, he said, “will be far more exceptional than ever before.”
The new president said he would immediately remove the US from the Paris Agreement on climate change and end the “EV mandate” and allow you to buy whatever car you want to buy – including the internal combustion-powered ones that accounted for about 92% of the US market last year.
Like former Secretary of State Clinton, President Joe Biden stood behind Trump during the inauguration. He appeared alternately tired and bemused as Trump took the opportunity to paint the last four years under Biden’s leadership as having fallen so far it can’t get up – if not for its new, resurgent savior.
“From this moment on, America’s decline is over,” Trump said.
And there was the airing of grievances, as Trump claimed that “Over the past eight years, I’ve been tested and challenged more than any other president in history.”
Adding “They tried to take my freedom and my life,” Trump concluded that the assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania,* pretty much assured his victory last November.
“I was saved by God to make America great again.”
In the closest Trump could come to JFK’s promise to put a man on the moon by the end of the 1960s, he said the nation would strive to “plant the Stars and Stripes on the planet Mars …” a nod to his biggest benefactor, SpaceX/Tesla/Starlink CEO and X/Twitter owner Elon Musk’s favorite cause.
After Joe and Jill Biden copter’d out, Trump visited the Capitol Visitor Center where he addressed the citizens who could not watch his inauguration from outside – this included Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R), on whom the president spent an inordinate amount of his 36 minutes there talking about plans for completing The Wall.
The border is Trump’s number one issue, he said, not inflation.
“How many times can you say the price of an apple has doubled?”
Though in later appearances Trump reiterated his promise to bring down prices, this seemed like another admission that slowing the rise of inflation, let alone reversing it, despite arguably being the major reason for his November victory, is a very difficult task best left to the Federal Reserve.
The border will not be quite so problematic. Minutes after his inauguration, Trump’s officials shut down the mobile app CPB One that had allowed migrants to make appointments in order to enter the US through legal points of entry, The Hill reports.
*CORRECTION: This article initially misidentified the Pennsylvania town where there was an assassination attempt on Trump at one of his campaign rallies.