WASHINGTON — Donald Trump made twofold history Monday, becoming the first to take the oath of office despite having tried to end American democracy, as well as becoming the first presidential convicted felon.
Administering the oath was Chief Justice John Roberts, whose Supreme Court conservative majority paved the way for Trump’s return by sidetracking a criminal prosecution based on his Jan. 6, 2021, attempt to remain in power.
The ceremony took place in the rotunda of the U.S. Capitol, where four years and two weeks earlier, a mob of Trump’s supporters — inflamed by his lies that the 2020 election had been stolen from him — rampaged through the building, searching for and threatening to murder Trump’s own vice president at the time, Mike Pence, for refusing his demand to award him a second term.
In his 30-minute inaugural speech, Trump wasted little time in lashing out at the criminal prosecutions that flowed from his actions that day.
“The vicious, violent and unfair weaponization of the department and our government will end,” he said just 90 seconds in.
“Never again will the immense power of the state be weaponized to persecute political opponents, something I know something about,” he said 15 minutes later.
The speech, which aides had billed as “optimistic,” sounded much like one of his campaign rally speeches as he accused the outgoing government of incompetence in basic functions and painted immigrants as “dangerous criminals.”
“A radical and corrupt establishment has extracted power and wealth from our citizens, while the pillars of our society lay broken and seemingly in complete disrepair,” Trump said. “We now have a government that cannot manage even a simple crisis at home, while at the same time stumbling into a continuing catalog of catastrophic events abroad. It fails to protect our magnificent law-abiding American citizens, but provide[s] sanctuary and protection for dangerous criminals, many from prisons and mental institutions that have illegally entered our country from all over the world.”
Trump also hammered on the culture war themes that drove his base, promising to eliminate diversity programs and declaring that, in the United States, there would only be two genders, male and female.
While vowing to end wars and avoid getting involved in any, he also suggested forcibly taking back the Panama Canal Zone, which was returned to Panama decades ago, while falsely claiming that the country was cheating the United States.
“China is operating the Panama County, and we didn’t give it to China. We gave it to Panama, and we’re taking it back,” he said.
Trump also hinted at a return to an expansionist policy that the nation has not pursued in more than a century.
“The United States will once again consider itself a growing nation, one that increases our wealth, expands our territory, builds our cities, raises our expectations and carries our flag to new and beautiful horizons, and we will pursue our manifest destiny into the stars, launching American astronauts to plant the stars and stripes on the planet Mars,” he said.
Trump’s return to the White House completes a remarkable comeback. Had he been convicted on the federal charges for his Jan. 6 actions — which authoritarian experts say meet the definition of a self-coup — Trump could have received decades in federal prison. Instead, he is again commander in chief of the United States armed forces and putative leader of the free world.
Had Roberts and the five other Republican-appointed justices not agreed to take Trump’s appeal in February 2024, Trump could well have been on trial for his actions leading up to and on that day’s violent attack on the U.S. Capitol amid the Republican presidential primary.
The high court then took four more months to issue a ruling that effectively gave Trump and all presidents immunity from criminal prosecution for all actions they take in office if they can argue that they were part of “official” duties.
The ruling made trial on the four felony counts of fraud and conspiracy impossible before the November election. After Trump narrowly won, special counsel Jack Smith dismissed the charges — along with unrelated charges in South Florida based on Trump’s refusal to turn over secret documents he took to his country club there. Smith cited long-standing Department of Justice policy not to prosecute a sitting president.
The court’s immunity ruling also helped Trump avoid any consequence following his 34 felony convictions in a New York City court last May for falsifying business records. Trump faced up to four years in prison from that jury verdict and had potentially exacerbated his situation by repeatedly flouting the trial judge’s rulings, leading to contempt of court citations.
But his lawyers pointed to the Supreme Court decision and said that immunity applied in the New York case as well, essentially arguing that Trump’s 2017 payments to his lawyer to reimburse him for a $130,000 payment to a porn star ahead of the 2016 election were “official” acts of the presidency because they took place while he was in office.
The trial court judge, Juan Merchan, ultimately found that argument specious but said that because Trump had been elected to the presidency again in November, he was not permitted by the Constitution to sentence him to anything.
Trump is only the second president in U.S. history to have won two nonconsecutive terms. The first was Grover Cleveland, who won the elections in 1884 and 1892. Cleveland, however, did not try to overturn democracy after losing to Benjamin Harrison in 1888. Nor was he a convicted criminal.