Why Today Is So Extraordinary
Happy Inauguration Day, America.
Good morning! It’s Monday, January 20, 2025. Today is Martin Luther King, Jr. Day and Inauguration Day, when the 45th president, Donald Trump, will become the 47th president as well.
Breaking: In what will likely be his final action before leaving office, President Biden issued preemptive pardons this morning to Dr. Anthony Fauci, retired Gen. Mark Milley, and the members of the House January 6th Committee.
“The issuance of these pardons should not be mistaken as an acknowledgment that any individual engaged in any wrongdoing,” Biden said, “nor should acceptance be misconstrued as an admission of guilt for any offense.”
Read on for more on what to expect today — and why you shouldn’t take what we’ll witness for granted.
As ubiquitous as the concept “democracy” may be, it often proves annoyingly difficult to define. But I’ve always liked the definition put forward by the Polish-born political scientist Adam Przeworski, who has said the answer to this question is simple: “Democracy is a system in which parties lose elections.”
Lose elections, that is, and accept it. Democracy is a system in which parties peacefully transfer power to their rivals.
Przeworski calls these sorts of cross-party transfers “alternations,” and by his calculations, they are a historical anomaly. According to his database, there were 2,886 national-level elections in the world between 1788 and 2008. In 79% of them, either the incumbent party won and stayed in power (with voters sometimes receiving an alternative option and sometimes not) or the outcome of the election (no matter who won) was not respected.
It is only in the remaining 21% that an opposition party won the election and was able to take power.
By Przeworski’s definition, the United States did not become a democracy in 1789, when George Washington was inaugurated as our first president. The U.S. also did not achieve democratic status in 1797, when John Adams was sworn in as the second. At the time, Adams called the transfer of power “the sublimest Thing ever exhibited in America” — but of course it was: Washington and Adams hailed from the same party.
No, by Przeworski’s metric, the U.S. became a democracy on March 4, 1801, when Thomas Jefferson (a Democratic-Republican) beat Adams (a Federalist) and took office as his successor. Przeworski considers it to have been the first true alternation in world history, the first time partisan control of a government changed hands due to a “national-level election based on individual suffrage.”
The men involved in these early transitions — Washington, Adams, Jefferson — were all proud to have helped found the country and to have peacefully handed power off to one another. But, as the historian Dennis Rasmussen has chronicled, they died feeling deeply pessimistic about the likelihood that their ambitious experiment would survive much longer.
As political parties started growing stronger, Washington wrote weeks before his death that he believed the U.S. was “moving by hasty strides to some awful crisis” from which it might not recover. Adams fretted in his later years that “the distemper in our Nation is so general, and so certainly incurable.” Jefferson wrote in the last year of his life that “the free principles of our government” would “not over-live the generation which established them.”
Seeing the direction in which partisanship was heading, they lost confidence that their descendants would be able to put aside ideology to continue alternating power.
But they were wrong. Today, when President-elect Donald Trump takes the oath of office — with the outgoing president, Joe Biden, and his defeated rival, Kamala Harris, sitting nearby — America will celebrate yet another peaceful alternation, a rare and extraordinary thing.
According to Przeworski, as of 2008, almost 40% of countries — China and Russia among them — had never experienced an alternation. In the 220 years of global history he studied, political power changed hands more frequently because of coups (577 of them) than elections (544).
This will be America’s 60th presidential inauguration. Many of the previous 59 had seemed unlikely to take place, elevating names like Polk, and Lincoln, and Carter, and Clinton that were never supposed to come after “President” in a sentence.
But this is surely one of the unlikeliest. Because of weather, Trump will be sworn in from inside the Capitol — the same building that was stormed by his supporters in January 2021, in a failed attempt to break the string of alternations that Adams and Jefferson kicked off. Following the riot, Trump was impeached (for a second time), then exiled from Washington, then indicted four times (and convicted once), then found liable for sexual abuse.
Now, he is hours away from assuming the world’s most powerful office, having accomplished what only one former president has done before him: winning a ticket back to the White House.
Not only that, but — despite all that transpired in the interim — he is receiving a strikingly warmer reception than he did upon his initial inauguration eight years ago. CEOs are flocking to kiss the ring: the world’s three richest men (Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg) are all attending today’s festivities. Republican lawmakers have gone from nervous allies to loyal superfans. Democratic lawmakers have gone from pledging resistance to promising cooperation.
Having won, for the first time, a slim popular vote victory and an even larger cultural victory; with his favorability rating newly above water; with Democrats weakened and Republicans solidified behind him; without needing to worry about running for re-election, Trump returns to Washington as empowered as at any point in his rollercoaster political career.
Now we will find out how long it lasts. In his first term, Trump’s polling numbers also saw a (much smaller) post-election bump — which ended in May 2017, after he fired FBI Director James Comey amid an investigation into ties between his campaign and Russia.
The early months of his administration were marked by legal headaches and chaotic infighting: on Day One, his press secretary was sent out to exaggerate crowd sizes; in Week One, his travel ban on Muslim-majority countries sparked protests nationwide.
Trump’s team, under incoming White House chief of staff Susie Wiles, has signaled that his second administration will be more organized and cohesive — starting on Day One. The president-elect is expected to hit the ground running today, by signing more than 200 executive orders. According to Fox News, his directives will include declaring a national border emergency, withdrawing from the Paris climate accords, ending federal DEI programs, establishing government-wide definitions of “male” and “female,” and weakening job protections for federal workers.
Per CNN, he is also expected to pardon at least some January 6th rioters. Per Politico, he may sign an executive order postponing enforcement of the TikTok ban while in the Capitol Rotunda, surrounded by the numerous Republicans lawmakers who voted for the ban. Per NBC, Trump’s deportations operations are set to begin with arrests on Tuesday in Chicago.
Many of these policies (including on gender and immigration) boast broad popular support; others (including pardoning January 6th rioters) do not, raising the risk that Trump will quickly overreach beyond what the public wants. The heart of Trump’s agenda will have to go through Congress, where Republicans have yet to agree on a process for his signature legislation, much less the policy that will be in it.
Trump, 78, is also older than any president at the time of their inauguration, which could come to haunt his tenure. And his team’s promises of cohesion may not be long for this world: according to CBS News, new rivalries and power centers are already beginning to form inside his orbit.
But, for now, Trump sits at the zenith of his popularity and power, a returning warrior who has come to Washington to cement the most improbable of comebacks. It is a day of celebration for him and his allies — and for the country, marking our 60th consecutive peaceful transfer of power, prolonging a bold political experiment that has already survived far longer than its founders could have dreamed of.
Today’s run of show
All times Eastern.
8:15 AM — President-elect Donald Trump, Vice President-elect JD Vance, and their families and advisers will attend a private service at St. John’s Episcopal Church, the so-called “Church of the Presidents,” a tradition dating back to Franklin Roosevelt’s inauguration in 1933. (St. John’s is also the church Trump stood outside with a Bible during the protests after George Floyd’s death.)
9:15 AM — President Joe Biden and First Lady Joe Biden will greet with Vice President Kamala Harris and Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff at the White House.
9:45 AM — President Biden and First Lady Biden will host a tea and coffee reception with President-elect Trump and future First Lady Melania Trump.
10:25 AM — The Bidens and the Trumps ride together from the White House to the Capitol, continuing a tradition that dates back to Martin Van Buren’s inauguration in 1837.
11:15 AM — The inaugural ceremony takes place in the Capitol Rotunda. It is the first swearing-in to take place there since Ronald Reagan’s second inauguration in 1985, which was also moved inside because of weather.
Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), as chair of the Joint Congressional Committee on Inaugural Ceremonies, will open the ceremony, followed by invocations by Cardinal Timothy Dolan and Rev. Franklin Graham and a musical selection by Christopher Macchio.
Shortly before noon, Vice President-elect Vance will be sworn in by Justice Brett Kavanaugh, using a family bible that belonged to Vance’s great-grandmother. Carrie Underwood will then perform “America the Beautiful.”
12 PM — President-elect Trump will be sworn in by Chief Justice John Roberts, using a family bible and the Lincoln Bible, which Abraham Lincoln used for his 1861 inauguration.
Trump will then deliver his inaugural address, followed by benedictions by Rabbi Ari Berman, Imam Husham Al Husainy, Pastor Lorenzo Sewell, and Rev. Frank Fann, and a performance of the National Anthem by Macchio.
AFTERNOON — Once the ceremony has concluded, Trump is expected to participate in a signing ceremony at the Capitol, where he will begin signing his first executive orders. The Joint Congressional Committee on Inaugural Ceremonies will then host the new president for a luncheon at the Capitol, continuing a tradition that dates back to Dwight Eisenhower’s inauguration in 1953.
1 PM — Biden will deliver remarks at a farewell event with staff at Joint Base Andrews.
2 PM — The Bidens will depart Joint Base Andrews for Santa Ynez, California, where they will begin his post-presidency.
3:30 PM — Trump will appear at Capitol One Arena, where his supporters will watch the festivities. He is expected to sign more executive orders at the arena.
5:30 PM — The Senate will vote on passage of the Laken Riley Act, an immigration bill will become the first piece of legislation Trump will sign into law. The chamber could also vote to confirm some of Trump’s top nominees, including Marco Rubio as Secretary of State.
7:15 PM — The Bidens will touch down in Santa Ynez.
TONIGHT — Trump will attend three inaugural balls, continuing a tradition that dates back to James Madison’s inauguration in 1809. He will then return for his first night back at the White House, where — among other things — a letter from Biden will be waiting for him.
Providing a historical context to today's events is helpful, even hopeful. But nonetheless I am struck by the irony of the peaceful transfer of power to a man who did his very best to violently wrest the outcome of the 2020 election from the American people.
I will not be watching today. Instead I will be making calls to my Congressional representatives, asking for their vigilant protection of democracy. I will be thinking about what I, one citizen, can do during the next four years. I will read some of MLK's speeches and wonder what he would ask of me.
We must keep Trump from making the concerns of our Founding Fathers into a reality.
As Rudyard Kipling said, “If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs …”