On Monday, January 20th, Donald Trump wasted no time erasing Joe Biden’s legacy after being sworn into office as the 47th president of the United States, pardoning all his supporters who rioted in the capital on January 6th, 2021. Four years after being voted out of the White House, Trump has a second chance to launch the golden Age of America.
Trump signed orders for increasing border security, main drug cartels foreign terrorists. He signed orders on border security, naming drug cartels as foreign terrorist organizations, limiting birthright citizenship, freezing new regulations, and establishing a task force for reducing the size of the federal government. He rescinded dozens of Biden directives, among them those that dealt with climate change. Trump said that walking back into the already remodeled Oval Office after his inauguration was “one of the better feelings I’ve ever had.” Unlike during his first term, when new staff members scrambled to figure out what exactly their president was trying to achieve, Trump moved rapidly and methodically to advance his agenda Monday.
His first move back in the White House was to pardon some 1,500 people charged in connection with the Jan. 6 attack, including those convicted of assaulting police officers. Trump commuted the sentences of 14 others, including leaders of the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys. In a second set of freestyle remarks in the Capitol’s Emancipation Hall, Trump attacked political adversaries, called the 2020 election “totally rigged” and blamed former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., for his supporters’ attacking the building on Jan. 6, 2021, in effort to overturn the 2020 election. Trump spoke from the perspective of a man on a mission after surviving a would-be assassin’s bullet this summer at a Pennsylvania rally.
“I was saved by God to make America great again,” Trump said, adding that he wants to be a “peacemaker and unifier. ”But he also spoke, in the second speech, from the perspective of a man still hung up on the past, from his election loss to the investigations into the Jan. 6 riot.
After four years in office, and four years seeking a comeback, his aides say Trump has a much better feel for the levers of power than he did when he was first inaugurated in 2017.
“The first two January 6 defendants have been released,” Ingrassia told reporters gathered outside the jail. He also posted about the brother’s release on social media, including a picture of them in a vehicle after leaving the jail, giving thumbs up.
“This is a few hours after President Trump signed his historic pardon,” Ingrassia said, adding that billionaire and Trump ally Elon Musk had helped the brothers’ release. CNN previously reported that Matthew Valentin had tried to tear a baton from a police officer on January 6, and Andrew Valentin threw a chair at a police line. Both were found guilty in September of assaulting police.
