Now-former President Joe Biden and First Lady Jill Biden have just boarded the Marine One helicopter to leave Washington DC, with President Donald Trump and First Lady Melania Trump walking them to the stairs to bid them farewell.
Former Vice-President Kamala Harris and her husband Doug Emhoff got into a car as they also departed the ceremony, with hugs from the Bidens
Trump sends a ‘tough’ message to the world
Donald Trump spoke of his desire to be a “peacemaker and unifier,” and followed up with a brief reference to yesterday’s breakthrough in the Middle East.
But to his global audience, this was another tough, challenging address, full of references to American strength and potential, if familiar, threats to those who stand in its way.
Trump called the Panama Canal a “foolish gift” to Panama and repeated his pledge to do something about it. “We’re taking it back,” he warned.
The Gulf of Mexico, he said, would henceforth be known as the Gulf of America. There was an almost throwaway line that under his leadership, America would be a country that “expands its borders,” although this was quickly followed by a pledge to plant the American flag on Mars.
A few yards away, Elon Musk greeted that line with a broad grin. Trump repeated an old threat to treat drug cartels as foreign terrorist organisations.
And of course, the president threw down the gauntlet of tariffs to the global economy. “We will tariff and tax foreign countries to enrich our citizens,” he warned. How all of this squares with his conviction that “sunlight is pouring over the entire world,” remains to be seen.