At 12.02pm in Washington DC, Donald Trump took the oath to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States,” and resumed his presidency. It was an oath taken that half the country expects to be not only tested, but broken.

Trump’s inauguration ceremony was without the massive pomp had it been witnessed in person by hundreds of thousands of people engulfing the Mall from the Capitol to the Lincoln Memorial. Instead, it was delivered in the Capitol’s very rotunda that was desecrated by his armies to stop the peaceful transfer of power four years ago. Trump did not mention January 6 in this speech – but none doubted he would pardon as many of the participants in the insurrection as he could reach with his pen.

President Donald Trump holds up one of the executive orders he signed at the public rally in Washington’s Capitol One Arena.Credit: Bloomberg

It was a dark and sombre speech, delivered with the scowl that Trump has mastered from his mug shot in Georgia when he was arraigned for trying to overturn that state’s presidential election in 2020, to the official portrait that every Australian will see in the immigration halls when they fly into a US airport.

As was the case eight years ago, the centrepiece of this speech was immigration: the threat posed to the nation by an uncontrolled surge of vicious........

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