Trump claims start of American ‘golden age’ as he goes scorched earth in first speech as president

President Donald Trump declared that a new “golden age of America” has started that would make the country he now leads “greater, stronger and far more exceptional than ever before” before delivering a dark and brooding denunciation of his own government in his inaugural address.

Standing behind a lectern adorned by the presidential seal for the first time since he addressed a small crowd of staff and supporters before leaving Washington in 2021, Trump said his return to the White House would ensure that America would “not allow ourselves to be taken advantage of any longer.”

“Our sovereignty will be reclaimed. Our safety will be restored. The scales of justice will be rebalanced. The vicious, violent and unfair weaponization of the Justice Department and our government will end and our top priority will be to create a nation that is proud, prosperous and free,” said Trump, who said the nation is in the midst of a “crisis of trust” because “a radical and corrupt establishment has extracted power and wealth from our citizens while the pillars of our society lay broken and seemingly in complete disrepair.”

Trump also claimed the government for which he is now responsible “cannot manage even a simple crisis at home, while at the same time stumbling into a continuing catalog of catastrophic events abroad” and accused the government of having “failed to protect our magnificent law abiding American citizens” while giving “sanctuary and protection” to “dangerous criminals, many from prisons and mental institutions that have illegally entered our country from all over the world.”

“We have a government that has given unlimited funding to the defense of foreign borders, but refuses to defend American borders, or, more importantly, its own people. A country can no longer deliver basic services in times of emergency,” he said.

The 47th president’s inaugural address echoed much of the rhetoric deployed in his 2024 campaign, during which he routinely described the country as “a nation in decline.”

He trashed America’s public health system as incapable of delivering in times of disaster, and said the country’s education system “reaches our children to be ashamed of themselves, in many cases, to hate our country, despite the love that we try so desperately to provide to them.”

He also claimed his win over Vice President Kamala Harris in last year’s election represented a mandate “to completely and totally reverse a horrible betrayal” and “to give the people back their faith, their wealth, their democracy and indeed their freedom.”

“Our liberties and our nation’s glorious destiny will no longer be denied, and we will immediately restore the integrity, competency and loyalty of America’s government,” he said.

The president promised that he’d take swift action to accomplish those goals with “a series of historic executive orders” to “begin the complete restoration of America and the revolution of common sense,” including by renewing his 2019 declaration of a national emergency along the US-Mexico border. Doing so will allow him to reprogram funds from other departments towards border enforcement.

He also said he’d return American immigration policy to that which existed at the end of his first term by restoring his administration’s “remain in Mexico” policy and ending the practice of releasing migrants to await deportation or asylum proceedings while being monitored electronically.

“All illegal entry will immediately be halted, and we will begin the process of returning millions and millions of criminal aliens back to the places from which they came ... and I will send troops to the southern border to repel the disastrous invasion of our country,” he said before stating that he would also order drug cartels designated as foreign terrorist organizations and invoke the 1798 Enemy Aliens Act to “use the full and immense power of federal and state law enforcement to eliminate the presence of all foreign gangs and criminal networks bringing devastating crime to us, soil, including our cities and inner cities.”

Continuing, Trump claimed that he’d be ordering the creation of an “external revenue service” to “tariff and tax foreign countries to enrich our citizens,” seemingly ignorant of the fact that foreign countries do not pay tariffs because they are paid by American companies that import foreign goods.

Additionally, the task of collecting tariffs is carried out by the Department of Homeland Security’s Customs and Border Protection agency, the successor to the U.S. Customs Service that was created during the presidency of George Washington.

Trump went on to claim that he would issue a separate order to “immediately stop all government censorship and bring back free speech to America,” apparently a reference to Biden-era policies under which the federal government engaged with social media platforms to point out when users were violating the platforms terms of service by spreading misinformation about Covid-19 and other matters.

He also denounced what he described as the previous administration’s use of “the immense power of the state” that was “weaponized to persecute political opponents” and vowed to “restore fair, equal and impartial justice under the constitutional rule of law.”

Continuing, Trump promised that his administration would “forge a society that is colorblind and merit based” by making it “the official policy of the United States government that there are only two genders, male and female” and ordering an end to what he called “radical political theories and social experiments” at the Department of Defense, a clear reference to Biden administration efforts to increase diversity in the military’s ranks.

The president’s dark declarations and denunciations of the government he leads were followed by incongruous boasts of making the country into “a nation like no other, full of compassion, courage and exceptionalism” and using his power to “stop all wars and bring a new spirit of unity to a world that has been angry, violent and totally unpredictable.”

“We will be prosperous, we will be proud, we will be strong, and we will win like never before. We will not be conquered. We will not be intimidated, we will not be broken, and we will not fail,” said Trump, who declared that the U.S. would be “a free, sovereign and independent nation,” something it has been since the signing of the Treaty of Paris that formalized America’s separation from Great Britain in 1783.