Trump inauguration as it happened: Donald Trump signs flurry of executive orders after being sworn in as 47th US president in Washington DC

Thank you for following our live coverage of Inauguration Day in the United States.

Donald Trump, who overcame impeachments, criminal indictments and a pair of assassination attempts to win another term in the White House, was this morning sworn in as the 47th US president.

In a series of speeches, Trump announced plans to reshape America and recast its relations with many nations around the world.

President Donald Trump and first lady Melania Trump dance at the Commander-in-Chief Ball, following his inauguration as the 47th US president.Credit: AP

Here are the main headlines from his first day in office:

• Trump gave immediate and unconditional pardons to almost all of those charged after the January 6 2021 attack on the US Capitol Building, including members of the far-right Proud Boys militant organisation and those who assaulted police.
• The US has withdrawn from the Paris Climate Accord, moved to stymie renewable energy and moved to open large areas of the Arctic for oil drilling.
• Trump signed orders declaring illegal immigration at the US-Mexico border a national emergency, designating criminal cartels as terrorist organisations, and targeting automatic citizenship for US-born children of illegal immigrants.
• Trump also rescinded executive orders that promoted diversity, equity and inclusion and rights for LGBTQ people and racial minorities.
• Another order withdrew the US from the World Health Organisation, saying the global health agency had mishandled the COVID-19 pandemic.
• Trump flagged large tariffs of 25 per cent on imports from Canada and Mexico but did not make any immediate commitments to implement the wider tariffs he has promised, including against China.
• A crackdown on Biden appointees has begun, with over 1000 set to be sacked and four key immigration officials already dismissed.
• In a speech littered with wild claims, Trump pledged to “take back” the Panama Canal from Chinese influence and rename the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America”.

Former police officer Michael Fanone, who lost consciousness and suffered a heart attack after a January 6 rioter shocked him with a stun gun, appeared taken aback to learn from a reporter that those who assaulted police officers are among the pardon recipients.

“This is what the American people voted for,” he said. “How do you react to something like that?”

Rioters take over the US Capitol building in Washington, DC on January 6, 2021.Credit: AP

Fanone said he has spent the past four years worried about his safety and the well-being of his family. Pardoning his assailants only compounds his fears, he said.

“I think they’re cowards,” he said. “Their strength was in their numbers and the mob mentality. And as individuals, they are who they are.”

Trump had suggested in the weeks leading up to his return to the White House that instead of blanket pardons, he would look at the January 6 defendants on a case-by-case basis. Vice-President J.D. Vance had said just days ago that people responsible for the violence during the Capitol riot “obviously” should not be pardoned.

Fourteen defendants, including several convicted of seditious conspiracy, had their sentences commuted, while the rest of those found guilty of January 6 crimes were granted “full, complete and unconditional” pardons by Trump.

President Donald Trump said on Tuesday his team was in the process of removing over a thousand appointees from the administration of former President Joe Biden, as the Republican announced four removals on social media, including of celebrity chef Jose Andres and former top general Mark Milley.

Mark Milley has been dismissed from his government role.Credit: AP

Trump said he was dismissing Milley, who was given a pre-emptive pardon by Biden on Monday, from the National Infrastructure Advisory Council. Andres was removed from the President’s Council on Sports, Fitness and Nutrition, Trump said in a post on Truth Social.

Four senior officials have also been removed from the Executive Office for Immigration Review, the federal office for adjudicating immigration cases, as Trump seeks to crack down on asylum seekers.

President Donald Trump also said his administration will move to suspend the security clearances of the more than four dozen former intelligence officials who signed a 2020 letter saying that the Hunter Biden laptop saga bore the hallmarks of a “Russian information operation.”

The action is an early indication of Trump’s determination to exact retribution on perceived adversaries and is the latest point of tension between Trump and an intelligence community of which he has been openly disdainful.

The move, announced via executive order, also sets up a potential court challenge from ex-officials seeking to maintain access to sensitive government information.

Among other false and misleading claims in US President Donald Trump’s inauguration addresses, his declaration that Americans “split the atom” prompted vexed social media posts by New Zealanders, who said the achievement belonged to a pioneering scientist revered across the Tasman.

Ernest Rutherford, a Nobel Prize winner known as the father of nuclear physics, is regarded by many as the first to knowingly split the atom by artificially inducing a nuclear reaction in 1917 while he worked at a university in Manchester in the United Kingdom.

The achievement is also credited to English scientist John Douglas Cockroft and Ireland’s Ernest Walton, researchers in 1932 at a British laboratory developed by Rutherford. It is not attributed to Americans.

Trump’s account of US greatness in one of Tuesday’s inauguration addresses included a claim that Americans “crossed deserts, scaled mountains, braved untold dangers, won the Wild West, ended slavery, rescued millions from tyranny, lifted millions from poverty, harnessed electricity, split the atom, launched mankind into the heavens and put the universe of human knowledge into the palm of the human hand.”

New Zealand politician Nick Smith, the mayor of Nelson, where Rutherford was born and educated, said he was “a bit surprised” by the claim.

Trump’s remarks provoked a flurry of online posts by New Zealanders about Rutherford, whose work is studied by New Zealand schoolchildren and whose name appears on buildings, streets and institutions. His portrait features on the 100-dollar banknote.

“Okay, I’ve gotta call time. Trump just claimed America split the atom,” Ben Uffindell, editor of the satirical New Zealand news website The Civilian, wrote on X. “That’s THE ONE THING WE DID.”

French President Emmanuel Macron has called on Europe to “wake up” and spend more on defence in order to reduce its reliance on the United States for its security, in a speech to the French military just as Donald Trump was inaugurated.

Without mentioning Trump by name, Macron referred to expected changes in Washington’s foreign policy, especially regarding the war in Ukraine, saying it was an “opportunity for a European strategic wake-up call.” It was his New Year’s speech to the military at the Army Digital and Cyber Support Command based near Rennes in western France.

French President Emmanuel Macron delivers his speech to the French Army.Credit: AP

“What will we do in Europe tomorrow if our American ally withdraws its warships from the Mediterranean? If they send their fighter jets from the Atlantic to the Pacific?” he asked.

Trump has criticised the cost of the war in Ukraine for US taxpayers and has made it clear that he wants to shift more of the fiscal burden onto Europe. He has vowed to bring the conflict to a swift end, even vowing to end it within 24 hours of taking office.

“Let’s not fool ourselves, this conflict will not be resolved tomorrow. Or the day after tomorrow,” Macron said.

Read more here.

Trump 2.0 means what he says and his delirious base expects nothing else, writes Bruce Wolpe, senior fellow at the US Studies Centre and former political staffer, in this analysis of the president’s first day in office:

“Trump’s inauguration ceremony was without the massive pomp had it been witnessed in person by hundreds of thousands of people engulfing the Mall from the Capitol to the Lincoln Memorial.

Instead, it was delivered in the Capitol’s very rotunda that was desecrated by his armies to stop the peaceful transfer of power four years ago. Trump did not mention January 6 in this speech – but none doubted he would pardon as many of the participants in the insurrection as he could reach with his pen.

It was a dark and sombre speech, delivered with the scowl that Trump has mastered from his mug shot in Georgia when he was arraigned for trying to overturn that state’s presidential election in 2020, to the official portrait that every Australian will see in the immigration halls when they fly into a US airport.”

Read more here.

Penny Wong and Donald Trump: the cerebral, cautious champion of Labor’s left and the brash real estate tycoon turned Republican hero. It hardly sounds like a match made in political heaven, writes Matthew Knott.

Yet, there was Australia’s foreign minister, in prime position at Trump’s inauguration in the Capitol Rotunda, seated next to his elder sister Elizabeth Trump Grau.

Not the cheap seats: Penny Wong was in the rotunda for the inauguration of US President Donald Trump.Credit: AP

Wong stood out in a crowd that was dominated by leading figures from the global right. Former British prime minister Boris Johnson was there instead of the UK’s current leader, Labour’s Keir Starmer, who didn’t score an invitation. Argentinian President Javier Milei and Italian leader Giorgia Meloni, both populist conservatives, were there too.

Wong, one of only a handful of foreign dignitaries in the room, received a golden ticket to the event despite the crowd size being dramatically cut back when the inauguration was moved indoors because of freezing temperatures. Countries with far bigger populations and economies than Australia’s – such as France and Germany – didn’t make the cut.

It was “such a privilege and honour to be the first Australian foreign minister to be invited and to attend an inauguration”, Wong enthused after the ceremony.

Read more here.

The Trump administration has taken steps to gain control of the US Justice Department immigration courts, firing four top immigration court officials including the chief judge, three sources have told Reuters.

The four officials were part of the Executive Office for Immigration Review, the federal office for adjudicating immigration cases.

One of those removed was chief immigration judge Sheila McNulty, America’s ABC News reported.

The sackings are understood to be one of the first signs that President Donald Trump will push through immediate changes in how refugee claims are processed.

As part of his sweeping immigration crackdown, Trump has the US military aiding border security, issued a broad ban on asylum and took steps to restrict citizenship for children born on US soil.

A large number of senior career diplomats who served in politically appointed leadership positions and also lower-level posts at the State Department are also leaving their jobs at the demand of the incoming Trump administration, which plans to install its own people, according to current and outgoing US officials.

Inaugurations generally have several features. There’s the oath of office, the inauguration parade, and the inauguration balls.

Trump and first lady Melania Trump have just danced at the Commander-in-Chief Inaugural Ball, which is geared towards military members.

Donald and Melania Trump dance at the Commander-in-Chief Inaugural Ball along with Vice President J.D. Vance and wife Usha.Credit: AP

The first lady wore a black and white dress custom-made by Hervé Pierre, the same designer who crafted her 2017 inaugural gown.

The pair enjoyed a slow waltz on a raised dais as hundreds of guests watched on.

Vice President J.D. Vance and his wife, Usha, then joined the Trumps on the dance floor.

Trump is also due to attend the Liberty Inaugural Ball, where Rapper Nelly, country singer Jason Aldean and disco legends the Village People are scheduled to perform. Following that is the Starlight Ball, which is geared towards high-dollar donors.

Trump will speak at all three. Australian Foreign Minister Penny Wong, who is in Washington to attend the inauguration as a representative of the Albanese government, has been invited to the Starlight Ball.

The mother of Enrique Tarrio, a leader of the far-right Proud Boys militant organisation who was sentenced to 22 years’ jail after the Capitol Building riot in 2021, said her son was ready to come home after having his sentence for sedition commuted by Donald Trump.

“He’s very excited,” Duarte Tarrio told Florida news website local10.com. “It’s surreal to him. He’s ready to go”

Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio rallies in Oregon in 2019.Credit: AP

Tarrio’s mother, who spoke to her son earlier in the day, was one of a few dozen people gathered at a Las Vegas restaurant for a private watch party, taking in the sights and sounds of President Donald Trump’s second inauguration.

“It was the best and most exciting inauguration I think ever,” she said.

A lawyer for Joseph Biggs, another former Proud Boys organiser whose sentence was commuted by Trump, said it was “wonderful” that his client would no longer have to serve his full 17-year sentence for seditious conspiracy.

“It gets him out of prison,” attorney Norman Pattis told Associated Press. “He had 13, 14 more years to go, and there’s no place like home.”

The Proud Boys are a group of far-right militants who engage in political violence. Some people wearing the group’s insignia were seen marching and chanting in the streets of Washington outside Trump’s inauguration.