The president-elect anticipates a message of unity and harmony eight years after proclaiming an “American massacre”
Donald Trump will formally assume office this Monday in Washington D.C. as the 47th president of the United States in a ceremony characterised by the presence of leaders of the international right and the CEOs of the main technology companies in the country and by a message of national unity, according to the president-elect himself, far from the alarmist tone of his first inauguration in 2016.
A mass in the church of San Juan in Lafayette Square will open the preliminaries of an inauguration that will begin at noon, local time (6:00 p.m. in mainland Spain and the Balearic Islands) on the west esplanade of the Capitol, the seat of the American legislature. After listening to the American anthem by tenor Christopher Macchio and one of the country’s quintessential patriotic songs, America the Beautiful — courtesy of country star Carrie Underwood — Supreme Court Justice John Roberts will swear in Trump in front of some 200,000 people, local authorities anticipate.
The idea of harmony that Trump wants to convey will begin to take hold with the arrival at the event of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, the country’s outgoing president and vice president, who will revive a tradition that the American president-elect skipped four years ago, by refusing to attend Biden’s inauguration after denouncing electoral fraud. Two weeks earlier, hundreds of his supporters had stormed the Capitol in an incident that shook the pillars of American democracy. The investigation against Trump for inciting the assault ended up suspended thanks to his victory in the 2024 elections.
The speech has not been disclosed but Trump advanced in a December interview with NBC News that “success and unity” will be the central themes of his statement. “I think both go hand in hand,” said the president-elect before advancing that he will also dedicate “however bad it sounds” a few words against illegal immigration, a phenomenon that Trump has always linked to insecurity, but in no case will he describe the apocalyptic landscape that he drew in his 2016 speech, when he spoke of an “American carnage” caused by crime, drugs and poverty.
THE NEW OLIGARCHY
In his farewell speech to the nation, Biden warned of the emergence of what he described as an “oligarchy” of Silicon Valley billionaires with the ‘big four’ at the head: Alphabet (Google), Amazon, Apple and Meta (Facebook). Its four CEOs — Sundai Pichar, Jeff Bezos, Tim Cook and Mark Zuckerberg — will be present at Trump’s inauguration after declaring their loyalty to the president-elect and his financial supporter during the campaign, the richest man in the world and president of the X social network, Elon Musk.
Musk, who has provided Trump with more than 200 million dollars during his re-election campaign, was singled out two weeks ago by French President Emmanuel Macron as the leading exponent of a “reactionary international” that has set itself the goal of destroying the rule of law through disinformation. Macron responded in those terms to Musk’s declared support for the far-right Alternative for Germany party whose co-president, Tino Chrupalla, will attend the inauguration ceremony.
The presence of foreign leaders is not very common at US presidential inaugurations, but Trump has decided to display the unity of the international right that he champions: for example, the president of Argentina, Javier Milei, the Italian prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, or the president of El Salvador, Nayib Bukele, are expected to attend. The European model of the president-elect, the Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán, has been invited but will not attend the ceremony.
Behind them will be the British Eurosceptic Nigel Farage, the French far-right agitator, Éric Zemmour, or the president of the ultra-conservative European parliamentary bloc Patriots for Europe, Santiago Abascal, accompanied. There will be no top-level representation of the European Union. The president of China, Xi Jinping, has declined the invitation and will send the country’s vice president, Han Zheng, in his place.
