Good morning. Today, at midday in Washington DC, Donald Trump will be inaugurated as president of the United States for the second time. Yesterday, he promised a blitz of executive orders on illegal immigration, transgender rights and other rightwing priorities within hours of his arrival.
While Trump’s return is an appalling prospect for those who viewed his first term and subsequent behaviour as proof that he is a proto-fascist, the mood is likely to be different in the US Capitol. One measure of the change: the Village People probably wouldn’t have thought it was a good idea to play at a “victory rally” last time around.
In 2017, Trump gave a famously nihilistic address about “American carnage”; today, we may hear a more emollient message, and he has claimed that his speech is “going to be a message of unity”. That may be an unrealistic ambition. But the shift in US politics this time around goes well beyond the returning president’s PR strategy.
For today’s newsletter, I spoke to the Guardian’s Washington DC bureau chief, David Smith, about how much more receptive Capitol Hill powerbrokers are to the prospect of a second Trump term than they were to the first – and what it means for his agenda. Here are the headlines.
Five big stories
Israel-Gaza war | About 90 Palestinian prisoners have been released in exchange for three Israeli hostages handed over by Hamas to Israel, as part of the ceasefire deal aimed at ending 15 months of war. Meanwhile, the UN said that the first trucks carrying desperately needed aid had entered Gaza.
NHS | Boris Johnson’s pledge to build 40 new NHS hospitals by 2030 across England “appears to be unachievable”, government advisers have told Labour ministers. The warning from the Infrastructure and Projects Authority classified delivery of the New Hospitals Programme as “red” – its highest risk rating.
TikTok | TikTok said it would restore services in the US after Donald Trump gave a reprieve on its US ban. Trump said that after taking office on Monday he would sign an executive order allowing the Chinese-owned video app additional time to find a buyer before facing a total shutdown.
Wealth | The wealth of the world’s billionaires grew by $2tn (£1.64tn) last year, three times faster than in 2023, according to a report by Oxfam. The latest inequality report from the charity reveals that the world is now on track to have five trillionaires within a decade.
Electric cars | No carmaker in the UK will have to pay fines for missing electric car sales targets in 2024, according to new analysis. All but one carmaker sold enough cars, or will be able to use so-called flexibilities, to avoid steep fines under the zero-emissions vehicle (ZEV) mandate.
In depth: ‘In the first term everybody was fighting. In this term, everybody wants to be my friend’
When Trump takes the oath of office today, he will do so indoors, at the rotunda of the US Capitol, because of extremely cold weather. While that means only 600 people will be able to attend in person, many, many more were hoping to do so: as his second term begins, the returning president has no shortage of wannabe friends.
“It feels like a great capitulation is happening,” said David Smith. “Like a lot of things in life, people are numb to it the second time around.”
Here’s a rundown of the favourable political climate that awaits Trump once he’s sworn in.
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Republicans | A new GOP establishment
When Trump took office in 2017, he was the flagbearer of a hostile takeover of the traditional GOP by a new populist flank. From the beginning, he faced sceptical Republicans on Capitol Hill who feared he was dooming them to a generation out of office.
Meanwhile, GOP institutions – like the influential Republican National Committee – were run by business-oriented traditionalists, and many of those who joined his administration saw their job as being to impose some kind of guardrails on the unpredictable new president.
The story in 2025 is very different, David said, with Trump in complete command of his party and with allies and loyalists in just about every position that will shape his presidency. “There has been a purge of the rebels,” he said. “Dissent has been crushed. Some have taken retirement; others have been beaten in primary contests, most famously Liz Cheney. The party is in his image now, and that’s another guardrail that has gone.”
He can expect complete loyalty from the new leadership of the RNC, Michael Whatley and Lara Trump (clue’s in the name). And the composition of the White House is very different. “In the first term, he defaulted to more experienced, establishment people, and there were reports of them literally removing papers from his desk so he wouldn’t sign them,” David said. “This time, he is surrounded by compliant loyalists, and they may be much more efficient about getting things done.”
As Sean Spicer, Trump’s first press secretary, tells David in this piece: “You’re watching these guys walk into this administration having known each other a lot longer … They have been able to use these four years out of office to plan a return in a way that no administration in modern history ever has been able to do.”
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Democrats | Fears that confrontations with Trump turn off voters
While Democrats are in the minority in both the House and the Senate, that was also true in 2017 – and back then, they interpreted their mandate for opposition as being to stand up to Trump at every opportunity. But this year, while there are many competing narratives that contain a grain of truth about the reasons for their defeat, one of the most influential is the idea that they were perceived as too “woke”, too focused on “resistance”, and too obsessed with Trump as an anti-democratic force.
“There are a hundred theories about why Harris lost,” David said. “But there is a case being made that they fell into the trap of being out of touch, and that regular people didn’t care much about an abstract concept like democracy.”
That’s why prominent Democrats are largely avoiding early confrontations with Trump as he returns to office – and falling in line on issues where they fear Republicans may, fairly or not, be able to paint them as radical left-wingers.
Earlier this month, for example, 48 of them joined with Republicans in the House of Representatives to pass a bill that could see undocumented immigrants charged with nonviolent crimes deported, with almost every Democratic vote in favour coming from those with smaller majorities in their seats. And in this video, many of them declare: “We are not here because of who we are against … we will work with anyone if they want to make life better for you.”
“It’s just accepting the reality that Trump won. And us just saying he’s a chaotic guy goes nowhere. That’s just baked into people’s consciousness,” Peter Welch, the senator for Vermont, told Semafor. “The fact is, people want change. So that means we have to be willing to change as well.”
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Business and tech leaders | CEOs vie for attention at Mar-a-Lago
Many businesses fell over themselves to condemn Trump after the 6 January insurrection. But after he won again, it didn’t take long for chief executives of America’s biggest companies to start to find that other principles were available.
Many companies have already abandoned climate change commitments and diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives. Senior executives at Visa, Goldman Sachs, Charles Schwab and many others joined him for an event at the New York Stock Exchange in mid-December; the Wall Street Journal called it “the week CEOs bent the knee to Trump”.
Tech leaders – an awful lot of crypto CEOs among them – have meanwhile made the pilgrimage to Mar-a-Lago to curry favour with a president whose view of whose interests to advance most closely resembles a medieval court. “You can never be too unsubtle for Trump,” David said. “Flattering his ego remains the most effective way to get the policy changes that you want.”
“We have a lot of great executives coming in, the top executives, the top bankers, they’re all calling,” Trump gloated at a press conference last month. “In the first term everybody was fighting. In this term, everybody wants to be my friend.”
Many of them have also donated lavishly to Trump’s inauguration fund, and Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, and Elon Musk – obviously – were expected to attend the ceremony today (although no update yet on changes to the guest list because of the move indoors). Zuckerberg reversed Meta’s position on factchecking with the same alacrity that he took the opposite position after Biden’s win; Trump said quite frankly that he was “probably” responding to threats that he has made in the past.
All of that stood behind Joe Biden’s farewell warning that “an oligarchy is taking shape in America of extreme wealth, power and influence that literally threatens our entire democracy.”
“If you do have these tech overlords at the ceremony, it will be a remarkable image of 2025,” David said. “It suggests that Biden was accurate about the arrival of a new tech-industrial complex. And the question for many people will be whether they are paying homage to him, or whether they are in control.”
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The public | Resistance movement in a state of exhaustion
In 2017, more than 1 million people took to the streets across the US in protest at Trump’s arrival, with about 500,000 on the Women’s March in Washington DC alone and many more around the world. They chanted: “Welcome to your first day, we will not go away!”
But eight years on, they have largely gone away: at the People’s March on Saturday, the successor event to the Women’s March, about 50,000 were expected – and just 5,000 showed up. US progressives are fatigued, and much less shocked. Trump’s margin of victory in November is a world away from his first win in 2016, which c despite losing the popular vote to Hillary Clinton, making the case that he is an anti-democratic presence more complicated to argue.
“The fact that he won the popular vote was very deflating to the opposition,” David said. “It became much harder to say that ‘this is not who we are’.”
If that is a depressing diagnosis, and while Trump is at the zenith of his power today, progressive optimists might hope that means the only way is down.
“Like pretty much every president before him, the downward trajectory begins on day one,” David said. “But if he doesn’t fulfil his promises, the question is when disillusionment starts to set in.”
What else we’ve been reading
After the release of the hostages Emily Damari, Doron Steinbrecher and Romi Gonen (above) marked the start of the Gaza ceasefire, Bethan McKernan’s superb dispatch captures some of the mood among Israelis and Palestinians alike. “I can’t believe I have survived,” says Asma Mustafa, a teacher from Gaza City. “I feel like I have written a line in the history of Palestine.” Archie
As TikTok went dark – if briefly – in the US, Emma Beddington sings the praises of the app’s beautifully deranged “For You” pages. Toby Moses, head of newsletters
John Harris’s column about the shocking lack of support for disabled adults in the UK has an arresting question that should make everyone pause: “If you are not disabled and you regularly go to a yoga class, choir practice, a book group or just the pub, when was the last time you did so with even a single disabled adult present?” Archie
Alex Needham’s interview with the American queer author, Edmund White, is a delight – with some superb lines from the sexual hedonist as he discusses his new memoir: “I would rather die than cuddle with somebody. I just find it cloying and annoying, somebody who strokes your hair when you want to be left alone.” Toby
Charlotte Edwardes’ interview with Rami Malek for Saturday magazine is a fine portrait of an actor brimming with stories about his life that he can’t quite decide whether to share. “You have no idea what my mum has been through,” he says. “As much as it would be good fun to tell you … it’s difficult enough travelling. Don’t make it harder.” Archie
Sport
Premier League | Ruben Amorim branded his team as the worst “maybe in the history of Manchester United” after a 3-1 defeat against Brighton on Sunday. Manchester City thumped Ipswich 6-0, David Moyes had his first win returning as Everton manager and heaped further pressure on Ange Postecoglou with a 3-2 victory over Tottenham, and Nottingham Forest defeated Southampton 3-2.
Women’s Super League | The England midfielder Ella Toone scored a hat-trick as Manchester United recorded their first win away at Manchester City, in a derby defined by an error-strewn display from young City goalkeeper Khiara Keating.
Snooker | Shaun Murphy claimed Masters success for a second time after a superb 10-7 victory over Kyren Wilson. Wilson fought back from a four-frame deficit to trail 8-7 before Murphy – world champion once in 2005 – held his nerve to deservedly triumph 10 years after his maiden Masters crown.
The front pages
Monday’s headlines are dominated by the three freed Israeli hostages and Donald Trump’s imminent inauguration. The Guardian leads with “Hostages out as truce holds”. The Times has “Three hostages are freed into their mothers’ arms”. The Mail says “Thank you for bringing Emily home”, referring to joint British-Israeli citizen Emily Damari. The Mirror splashes with “Out of the darkness … back in mum’s arms”, and the Sun runs with “Home at last”.
The Telegraph leads on “Starmer races for Trump trade deal”, below a prominent photo of Damari and her mother. The Financial Times reports “Trump poised to launch blitz of 100 orders from day one”. i says “Historic hostage swap begins in Middle East – as world readies for Trump 2.0”.
Today in Focus
Trump 2.0
As Donald Trump returns to the White House, Hugo Lowell and David Smith discuss what to expect from his first few weeks
Cartoon of the day | Edith Pritchett
The Upside
A bit of good news to remind you that the world’s not all bad
In the foothills of the Himalayas, a village in Kashmir, India, installed a 2-metre-tall waterwheel designed by researchers at the Technical University of Munich. This waterwheel generates continuous, zero-carbon electricity and is part of a larger renewable energy setup.
Waterwheels, efficient and environmentally friendly, are being used globally, such as along the serene banks of London’s River Wandle and in Northern Ireland where a restored historic waterwheel powers a restaurant. Instructions for building these waterwheels are available online, with costs starting as low as $1,000 (£819).
As electricity prices rise, waterwheels are gaining interest for their potential to power homes, businesses, and irrigation systems, contributing to energy independence and sustainability.
Bored at work?
And finally, the Guardian’s puzzles are here to keep you entertained throughout the day. Until tomorrow.
