By Barbara Miller, ABC North America correspondent in Washington DC
US President Donald Trump speaks in the Roosevelt Room at the White House on 21 January, 2025, in Washington, DC. Photo: AFP
Analysis - The deep divisions over the man who has taken back the White House were on stark display in the US capital this week.
Washington DC was at once a party and a ghost town.
It was filled with happy supporters of the new president, many of them tourists, kitted out in Trump beanies and MAGA caps.
Despite the bitter cold, they joyfully celebrated the second coming of the man who claims his victory was God-given.
"I was saved by God to make America great again," the incoming president said in his inauguration address, a reference to his brush with death on a field in Butler, Pennsylvania in July last year.
Yet there was also a quiet in Washington's streets, the noticeable absence of many of the city's predominantly Democratic residents.
As Trump 2.0 arrived with fireworks, a circus-like show in a downtown arena and a blizzard of executive orders, many locals stayed home.
As if back in Covid times they hunkered down, licking their wounds and wondering how to get through the next four years.
"I'm not going to catastrophise this time around," one man told me of his coping strategy, not sounding too convinced he'd pull it off.
Shock, awe and a reality check
It was an inauguration address like no other.
After announcing the advent of America's "golden age", Donald Trump proceeded to trash his predecessor who was sitting just metres away from him.
Joe Biden, he suggested, was part of "a radical and corrupt establishment" that had "extracted power and wealth from our citizens".
Donald Trump is sworn in as the 47th US President in the US Capitol Rotunda in Washington, DC, on January 20, 2025. Photo: AFP / Pool / Saul Loeb
Trump said he'd declare a national emergency at the southern border and a national energy emergency, end government diversity and equity programs and decree that there were only two genders.
The former reality TV star then headed downtown, where he made a show of signing the first of his executive orders at a fake Oval Office desk in an arena filled with his supporters.
Later, at the White House, he signed more orders as he made off-the-cuff comments to reporters gathered in the actual Oval Office.
Among the most headline-grabbing of these was the decision to pardon and commute the sentences of those convicted over the January 6 attack on the US Capitol four years ago.
Within hours, the "J6 hostages," as MAGA world calls them, would start to walk free.
By that point, America's 47th president was making the rounds of the traditional inauguration balls, dancing with his wife Melania, and later, noticeably more enthusiastically, with a sword.
Did the man have no off button?
As his team had promised, it was in many ways a day of shock and awe.
And yet when you scratched a little deeper there was a familiar gap between the rhetoric and the reality.
Trump signed more executive orders on his first day in office than any other president, but the total - 26 - was nowhere near the 100 or even 200 that had been foreshadowed.
The pushback against some of these actions is already underway.
A court in Washington state has placed a temporary stay on the move to end the automatic right to US citizenship for anyone born here, regardless of their parents' legal status.
Four Democratic-led states brought the action, one of multiple lawsuits backed by 22 states, who argue the move is unconstitutional.
President Donald Trump signs documents as he issues executive orders and pardons for January 6 defendants in the Oval Office at the White House on Inauguration Day in Washington, DC, on January 20 Photo: Carlos Barria/Reuters via CNN Newsource
"Obviously, we'll appeal it," Trump responded, apparently unperturbed.
The president knows some of these orders will become caught up in legal battles, but in the short-term that doesn't really matter.
He's thrown his supporters some red meat, and he'll relish the fight.
Reward and retribution
It was the morning after his swearing in and Trump was sitting on a church pew looking decidedly uncomfortable.
He appeared to be struggling to stay awake during the multi-faith prayer service at the National Cathedral, held to cap off inauguration events.
Then a bishop shook things up, issuing a direct plea to the president to show mercy to people she said might feel scared as a result of his executive orders, including the LGBTQ community and illegal immigrants.
"The people who pick our crops and clean our office buildings, who labour in poultry farms and meat-packing plants, who wash the dishes after we eat in restaurants and work the night shifts in hospitals.
"They may not be citizens or have the proper documentation, but the vast majority of immigrants are not criminals. They pay taxes and are good neighbours," Episcopal Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde told the congregation.
Trump and his allies were quick to lash out, the president calling Bishop Budde "nasty in tone" and "not very good at her job".
One Republican congressman suggested the Bishop be "added to the deportation list".
Parallel versions of the spat played out during Trump's first days back in the White House.
Those who have been loyal to him have been rewarded.
They include the people who, fired up by his false claims of a stolen election, stormed the Capitol in January 2021, some of them violently assaulting police officers and calling for the vice-president to be hanged.
On the flip side, his perceived enemies have been denigrated and punished.
Trump has moved quickly to strip security protections from a number of former high-ranking officials with whom he has had public disputes.
On the list are former chief medical adviser Anthony Fauci, former secretary of state Mike Pompeo, and former national security adviser John Bolton.
All have previously received death threats, the latter two from Iran.
Trump promised revenge and retribution, and on that front he's delivered.
A brave new world
The new president is however already faltering on several key pledges.
He hasn't ended the Ukraine war in a day, he hasn't yet imposed tariffs on China, Canada and Mexico, and the deportation raids his team flagged have, at time of writing, not yet eventuated at scale.
That's not to say that Trump's brave new world is not emerging.
Refugees cleared to come to the US have had their flights cancelled.
Undocumented migrants, and there are millions of them living and working in the US, must now live in fear of deportation.
An app used by migrants still in Mexico to book appointments to seek asylum in the US has been shut down.
Government employees are being encouraged to dob in anyone continuing to work on programs aimed at promoting diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility in the workplace.
The new president is also threatening to take a wrecking ball to the agency that responds to natural disasters, FEMA.
All this as the tech billionaires who once censored him now vie for his attention.
In a striking image of this about face, the world's three richest men had seats in the VIP section at the inauguration - Tesla CEO and now close confidante Elon Musk, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and Meta's Mark Zuckerberg.
Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Sundar Pichai and Elon Musk, attended the inauguration. Photo: JULIA DEMAREE NIKHINSON / AFP
'Here I am'
"Many people thought it was impossible for me to stage such a historic political comeback," Trump said in his inauguration address.
"But as you see today, here I am."
The decisiveness of Trump's win doesn't change the fact that he, like all presidents before him, doesn't have long to enact his plans.
By next year, the midterm election races will be heating up.
If the president hasn't delivered on his promises on the economy or foreign wars, or if his campaign against illegal migrants has backfired, he could find that Republican members of Congress looking to hold onto their seats are more willing to defy him.
Republicans now control the House and Senate but could lose their grip on one or both in the November 2026 elections, making it a lot more difficult to pass legislation.
The bromance with Musk, owner of X, could also be tested over the coming days and weeks, with signs of tension already surfacing.
For now, this is Trump and the MAGA movement's moment.
It'd be easy to say we'd seen it all before.
There is some truth in that, but Trump 2.0 is like Trump on steroids.
He's bolder, more organised, surrounded by a fiercely loyal team and, as yet, largely unchecked.
Trump's first term now seems like just the warm-up act.
I spoke this week with Michael Fanone, a former police officer who was tasered and beaten by the rampaging mob as he defended the Capitol building on January 6, 2021.
It'd be fair to say that a day after those convicted over the attack were pardoned, he was in a pretty dark place.
But he said he was not surprised, and he argued no-one should be.
"Donald Trump has told us who he is and what he intends to do," he said.
"The fact that we as a people cannot come to terms with that and recognise that those things will come to fruition is our own shortcoming."
- This story was originally published by ABC News
