Nobody ever accused Donald Trump of consistency. Shortly after being sworn in, he promised to bring peace to the world, reoccupy the Panama Canal and expand America’s territory. The latter sounded very much like a declaration of war — a first in the history of US inaugural addresses. The trick, as ever with Trump, is to figure out what he means from the merely rhetorical. 

His imagery of a new golden age was very different to 2017 when he spoke of “American carnage”. But his speech this time round carried far more specific actions, including territorial aggression on America’s neighbours, US troops on the Mexican border, the start of mass deportations of illegal immigrants, an end to electric vehicle subsidies and a new age of “drill baby, drill”. These should be taken seriously.

The vibes in the Capitol Rotunda also spoke volumes. It would be an understatement to say Trump’s second inauguration was unprecedented. Surrounded by the world’s richest men, with north of a trillion dollars of wealth in the room, topped by Elon Musk ($434bn), Jeff Bezos ($240bn) and Mark Zuckerberg ($212bn), Trump’s return was blessed by what outgoing president Joe Biden called the new oligarchy. 

Never before has such wealth rubbed inaugural shoulders with a president who is also a billionaire.

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President Trump issued pardons for some 1,500 defendants who participated in the siege on the U.S. Capitol four years ago, including the leader of a far-right group, fulfilling a campaign promise to exercise executive clemency on behalf of people he’s called “patriots” and “hostages.”

“We hope they come out tonight,” he said in a signing ceremony at the Oval Office on Monday evening.

The order would grant “a full, complete and unconditional pardon to all other individuals convicted of offenses related to events that occurred at or near the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021.” That means a pardon for Enrique Tarrio, the former Proud Boys chairman, who had been sentenced to 22 years in the federal penitentiary.

The proclamation posted on the White House website also included commutations for 14 people, including Stewart Rhodes, the founder of the far-right Oath Keepers group. The move paves the way for the release of Rhodes and Tarrio, who were both convicted of the rarely used charge of seditious conspiracy, along with the release of more than a thousand others.

Trump also directed the Justice Department to dismiss scores of pending cases that stem from the attack on the Capitol.

Rhodes had been sentenced to spend 18 years in prison after a judge said he presented “an ongoing threat and peril to this country … and to the very fabric of our democracy.”

Trump also issued sweeping pardons for rioters convicted of violence against police and issued sweeping pardons for scores of other defendants who participated in the siege on the U.S. Capitol four years ago, a day that upended the peaceful transfer of power to newly-elected President Joe Biden.

The hours-long assault on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, injured more than 140 police officers, in one of the largest-ever mass attacks on law enforcement officers in the United States. U.S. Capitol and Washington, D.C., police persisted in defending the building, in the face of getting sprayed with harsh chemicals or beaten with flagpoles.

During the trial, the Justice Department presented the jury with thousands of messages from Rhodes and other Oath Keepers before, during and after the events of Jan. 6, including Rhodes’ comments that “we aren’t getting through this without a civil war” and “the final defense is us and our rifles.”

Tarrio was not present at the Capitol that day. But prosecutors said he encouraged the violence from afar by posting on social media: “Proud of my boys and my country” and “Don’t f****** leave.” The following day, Jan. 7, Tarrio told some of his members that he was “proud” of them.

Undoing DOJ investigation

The pardons and commutations largely undo the results of one of the most complicated investigations in the history of the Justice Department. Prosecutors and FBI agents there spent years probing the actions of people at or near the Capitol on Jan. 6, using photos, video and telephone location data to help identify potential suspects.

Federal judges in Washington, where the courthouse cafeteria boasts a view of the Capitol dome and the scene of the crime, generally imposed lighter punishments than the DOJ had requested in hundreds of Jan. 6 cases. But they also pushed back hard in their courtrooms against efforts to rewrite the history of that day, amid claims from Trump and his allies that the rioters had been unfairly targeted for prosecution.

One D.C. district court judge appointed by Trump, Carl Nichols, recently said in court that blanket pardons for the Capitol defendants would be “beyond frustrating and disappointing.”

The investigation became a priority for former Attorney General Merrick Garland, who told NPR a year after the attack on the Capitol that “every FBI office, almost every U.S. attorney’s office in the country is working on this matter. We’ve issued thousands of subpoenas, seized and examined thousands of electronic devices, examined terabytes of data, thousands of hours of videos.”

But the Justice Department’s case against Trump, for allegedly conspiring to cling to power and deprive millions of Americans of the right to have their votes count in 2020, ended with a whimper.

Special counsel Jack Smith secured a four-count felony indictment of Trump but said he was forced to abandon the case after Trump won the 2024 election, based on a longstanding DOJ view that a sitting president cannot be charged or face trial.

Smith said in court papers that the government “stands fully behind” the case it developed.

—NPR’s Tom Dreisbach contributed to this report.