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It was a bright cold day in Washington and the clocks were striking 8:18. Caitríona Perry, a BBC correspondent swaddled up against the cold on a DC rooftop, had been interviewing Kid Rock—a musician and Trump supporter who was seated indoors somewhere, sporting a hat with the slogan “GRIT” and puffing on a cigar—but Kid Rock was now turning the questions back on Perry, asking her what she was doing today, and then what she looks like. Perry laughed nervously and replied that she looked like she was ready to hit the slopes. “I love to go skiing,” Kid Rock said. “You sound sexy, you wanna go with me?” Perry paused, and declined to address the suggestion. “We’re doing no skiing today,” she said. “We’ve got a day of broadcasting to do.”
Across the city, other journalists were starting their days of broadcasting, too, ushered in by music that struck the typical TV-news balance of jaunty and momentous. I started my day of watching on NBC News Now, where the focus was on the pomp and pageantry of inauguration day; an anchor briefly broke in with some news—outgoing President Joe Biden had just preemptively pardoned several avowed enemies of incoming President Donald Trump, while stressing that they had not done anything wrong—but then it was back to talk of tea and coffee, the moving of furniture, and whether Biden would be leaving Trump a handwritten note. (“We have asked many advisers about this,” NBC’s senior White House correspondent said.) Over on ABC, journalists were talking about inauguration gifts; then, around 10am, they waxed lyrical over footage of Trump pulling up at the White House to meet with Biden. (“Both presidents,” the host of ABC’s nightly newscast said, had just shown “what a peaceful transfer of power is supposed to look like.”) On CBS, the former Republican senator Roy Blunt—who is an expert on inaugurations, having overseen Biden’s after a mere few weeks of tying himself in knots as to whether Biden was actually the “president-elect”—was pressed into service as a commentator. “Democracy,” he said, had triumphed over “party.”
By now, all eyes were on the Capitol Rotunda, where the inauguration was taking place due to the bitter cold outside. According to Punchbowl News, only twenty reporters were allowed inside to cover the proceedings, due to space restrictions. Whether they were the only journalists present, however, depends on how you define the term. Tucker Carlson was there, as was Joe Rogan. So were media moguls, plural: Rupert Murdoch, who needs no introduction; Bernard Arnault, who needs no introduction as the CEO of the luxury conglomerate LVMH but perhaps does as a French media tycoon; Jeff Bezos, the owner of the Washington Post. Bezos bought another journalist in with him: his fiancée, Lauren Sánchez, a former local TV anchor in California. Her attendance raised eyebrows—the spouses of members of Congress, not to mention various governors, didn’t make it inside.
Indeed, pretty much everything about Bezos’s presence and that of the other tech moguls sitting alongside him—Mark Zuckerberg (of Meta), Sundar Pichai (of Google), and Elon Musk (of X and, erm, hand gestures); a/k/a the “tech-industrial complex”; a/k/a the new American “oligarchy”—raised eyebrows: the four men were positioned prominently in the Rotunda, in front of members of Trump’s incoming cabinet, and the cameras kept panning to them as they waited for the inauguration to start. At one point, I’m sure I saw Jared Kushner blow a kiss in the direction of Bezos (though I’m willing to accept that I imagined it, or at least that Bezos wasn’t the intended recipient, given his fastidious standards around avoiding the perception of political bias). They all looked like they were having a good time, apart from Pichai, who, to my eye at least, looked a bit like he wanted the ground to swallow him whole.
Midday was nearing, and the man from the elephant party would soon be in the room. Already, by this point, the well of journalistic Trump clichés was running dry: we’d heard that he was returning to office “defiant” and “emboldened,” but also that his inaugural speech would be one of “unity,” and not of “American carnage” like last time; we’d heard about Trump’s likely “tone” and whether he would “put people at ease”; we’d heard about the difference between “campaign Trump” and “teleprompter Trump.” Before he was sworn in, there was time for some more breaking news: Biden had just preemptively pardoned several members of his family, again stressing that they’d done nothing wrong. On CBS, there was muttering about “timing” and “optics”; the anchor of the network’s top Sunday show tweeted that the news was “an extraordinary contrast to the moment of enduring democracy & law and order.” But then Biden was gone, and Trump was back, his return to the presidency legally ratified by journalists tweeting out the fact, just as the Founders intended.
“The golden age of America begins right now,” Trump said. “The American Dream will soon be back and thriving like never before,” he said. “My proudest legacy will be that of a peacemaker and unifier,” he said. “Today is Martin Luther King Day and…in his honor, we will strive together to make his dream a reality,” he said. “Never again will the immense power of the state be weaponized to persecute political opponents,” he said. “Something I know something about,” he said. “By invoking the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, I will direct our government to use the full and immense power of federal and state law enforcement to eliminate the presence of all foreign gangs and criminal networks,” he said. “We are going to be changing the name of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America,” he said. William McKinley “was a natural businessman and gave Teddy Roosevelt the money for many of the great things he did, including the Panama Canal, which has foolishly been given to the country of Panama after the United States—I mean, think of this—spent more money than ever spent on a project before and lost thirty-eight thousand lives in the building of the Panama Canal,” he said. “We’re taking it back,” he said. The cameras panned to Kamala Harris, the outgoing vice president, sitting stone-faced while just behind her, Dana White, of the Ultimate Fighting Championship, grinned. (Imagine writing that sentence ten years ago.)
“President Trump, with a lower-key tone, but a speech that echoed and mirrored many of the statements of his last inaugural speech four years ago,” Lester Holt said on NBC right after Trump stopped talking. (Holt meant eight.) His colleague Kristen Welker reached a similar conclusion, “despite the fact that he had teased that this would be a unifying address”; she carried on talking on the same theme, but Holt broke back in to introduce Carrie Underwood, who had agreed to sing “America the Beautiful” after, another NBC anchor said, answering “the call to come together in the spirit of unity.” Underwood sang a cappella, apparently because of a technical malfunction. “A/V guy the first to get deported,” a journalist quipped online.
Four minutes later, Arelis R. Hernández, a journalist at the Washington Post, tweeted a video from Ciudad Juárez, on Mexico’s border with the US, where migrants waiting for prearranged parole appointments had just learned that the new administration had turned off the app used to organize them, and that the appointments were canceled. A woman, swaddled up against the cold, wept. All around her, camera shutters clicked.
In DC, too, attention had already started to shift to the massive slate of new policies that Trump was poised to enact with the stroke of his Sharpie—even before he was sworn in, the homepage of the New York Times boasted two full-width headlines, one atop a section about the pomp and circumstance, the other, immediately below, atop a section about impending executive orders. Various reporters relayed matter-of-factly that Trump was about to sign an order ending birthright citizenship; media critics noted that Trump can’t just do that, since the right is enshrined in the Constitution. Things Trump could simply do included withdrawing the US from the Paris climate accord and withdrawing the US from the World Health Organization.
And so stories that, in Trump’s first term, would have driven whole news cycles—and in some cases did—tumbled forth, one after the other, the sheer volume of new policies inevitably slicing and dicing the media’s ability to scrutinize each one. It’s tempting to see this as a tactic; perhaps it was. But this was not a flurry of covert action signed off behind closed doors; rather, this was policy as pomp. In the early evening, Trump took to the stage at the Capital One Arena, where—after some trademark rambling remarks (I drifted away for a moment and plugged back in to find him complaining about windmills and whales, a signature Trump bit)—he sat at a makeshift desk and began signing documents, as the crowd whooped and photographers crowded around. For Trump, “a presidential act performed silently may as well not have happened,” the Times TV critic James Poniewozik observed. “The wonder, perhaps, is not that Mr. Trump used an arena stage as an Oval Office simulacrum but that he doesn’t just move the Oval Office to an arena permanently.”
Later, Trump continued signing away, in the actual Oval this time—though again, cameras were present, as were journalists, who were able to pepper a serene-looking Trump with questions for around forty-five minutes as he scribbled. (“Donald Trump today may have spoken more words, to the public and to journalists, than Joe Biden in the entire last year of his presidency,” The New Yorker’s Susan Glasser noted later on MSNBC.) Among the words spoken in the Oval: Trump remarking that he’d gone to Saudi Arabia on the first foreign trip of his first term after the country agreed to buy billions of dollars of US products; Trump saying that the North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un has “tremendous condo capability” and “a lot of shoreline”; Trump answering a question about his campaign promise to end the Russia-Ukraine war in a day by saying “I have another half a day.” At one point, Peter Doocy, of Fox, asked whether Biden had left Trump a letter after all, prompting Trump to fish it out of a drawer. “Thank you, Peter,” he said. “It could have been years before we found this thing.”
Before the day was out, Trump had also issued pardons to the vast majority of rioters convicted of involvement in the insurrection of January 6, 2021, the last time both presidents were involved in a peaceful transfer of power; he also commuted the sentences of members of the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers militia. Predictably, this drove the news cycle, not least on CNN. In the 9pm Eastern hour, Paula Reid, the network’s chief legal-affairs correspondent, discussed both the Trump pardons and Biden’s from earlier; “both the former president and the current president,” she said, had used “a very expansive definition of clemency.” Scott Jennings, a conservative commentator, said that the words “gritty, resilient, determined, and audacious” came to mind to describe Trump’s inauguration day, adding that “there’s not, like, a more perfect advertisement for the value of these qualities in modern America”; asked to comment on the January 6 pardons, he suggested that the rioters had been punished enough, though he did seem uncomfortable that those who attacked police officers were among those let off. Appearing later, Chris Sununu, the former Republican governor of New Hampshire, shared that discomfort, and said that the blanket nature of the pardons had surprised him. Referring to jubilant scenes outside a DC jail where rioters were being held, he added, “I don’t think the White House wants that. It’s a complete distraction.”
Around the same time, Kid Rock was on Fox News talking to Sean Hannity. He still had a cigar in hand, but was now dressed in black tie. After extolling the January 6 pardons as “great”—and dismissing Biden’s as a “clown show”—he turned his attention to the press and what he perceives as its unfair treatment of Trump. “I think people are really starting to see through what the mainstream media has tried to do to this man,” he said. “It’s a travesty. There’s some people’s heads that should be put in a guillotine.” Skiing sounded more fun.
Other notable stories:
- Among his flurry of executive orders yesterday, Trump moved, as expected, to stall enforcement of a federal law, passed last year with bipartisan support, banning TikTok; the order provides for a seventy-five-day delay that Trump hopes will allow time for a deal that allows TikTok to remain online in the US while addressing national security concerns around the app’s Chinese ownership—though it isn’t clear that he actually has the legal authority to delay enforcement of the law, while other tech companies that work with TikTok may not see Trump’s order as a sufficient guarantee against penalties. The Wall Street Journal reported prior to Trump signing the order that the Chinese government had, for the first time, signaled an openness to some sort of deal—though CNN suggests today that China isn’t happy about the order.
- Prior to the inauguration, Michael M. Grynbaum, of the New York Times, examined how Fox News might cover a new administration staffed with at least nineteen former Fox personalities; the network’s top opinion hosts “can be expected to lionize” them, though correspondents may face a more “delicate” task. (A Fox executive described the situation as “business as usual.”) Yesterday, Grynbaum and John Koblin reviewed Fox’s coverage of the inauguration; its hosts, they wrote, “narrated the proceedings like happy commentators at a parade.” Meanwhile, Mediaite’s Colby Hall crunched the numbers on Fox’s current ratings dominance, finding that it aired the five hundred most-watched cable news shows between the election and January 14.
- While Trump was being inaugurated in Washington, Debra Tice—the mother of Austin Tice, an American journalist who was abducted in Syria in 2012 and has been missing ever since—was in Damascus, where she met in the presidential palace with a rebel leader who spearheaded the shock overthrow of Bashar al-Assad’s regime last year, then held a news conference. Tice said that while she had no new information about her son’s whereabouts, she felt confident that Syria’s new leaders would aid in her search. She also expressed faith in Trump, having recently criticized Biden’s team for dragging their feet. “Things are going to change,” she said.
- Today, a court in London was due to finally begin proceedings in a consequential case involving claims that Prince Harry and Tom Watson, a former British lawmaker, have brought against British tabloids owned by Rupert Murdoch, alleging that they accessed their private information, then covered it up. (Will Lewis, now the CEO of the Washington Post, has been accused of complicity in the cover-up; he is not a defendant in the case and denies the claim.) The start of proceedings was delayed, however, to allow the parties’ lawyers to talk. The BBC has a live blog on the case.
- And the tennis star Novak Djokovic took offense after Tony Jones, a veteran sports journalist on Australia’s Channel Nine, jokingly chanted on air that Djokovic is “overrated” and a “has-been” during coverage of the Australian Open; Jones also appeared to reference Djokovic’s expulsion from the country in 2022, a result of his refusal to get the COVID vaccine. Djokovic said that he would boycott Channel Nine until he received an apology. Both Jones and the network have now said sorry.
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