Morning Rundown: Trump completes his once-improbable comeback, millions brace for frigid temps, and Bills win the battle of MVP favorites
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For more than a century, according to State Department records dating to 1874, no foreign leader has attended a U.S. presidential inauguration, being represented instead by ambassadors and other high-level officials. That will change today as Trump’s swearing-in is witnessed by multiple presidents and prime ministers.
They include Argentinian President Javier Milei, the first foreign leader to meet with Trump after he was elected in November, who is also set to attend one of the official inaugural balls. Another is Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, who like Milei made a post-election pilgrimage to Trump’s Mar-a-Lago golf resort.
Ecuadorean President Daniel Noboa and Paraguayan President Santiago Peña were also invited to the inauguration and plan to attend, The Associated Press reported, citing their offices. Both Milei and Peña were special guests at the Hispanic Inaugural Ball on Saturday night.
Trump also invited Chinese President Xi Jinping, who declined to attend but sent Vice President Han Zheng as his “special representative.” Han met yesterday with Vice President-elect JD Vance as well as Elon Musk, an influential Trump adviser who has extensive business interests in China, including EV maker Tesla.
A Taiwan delegation led by the Beijing-claimed island’s parliament speaker also traveled to Washington for the inauguration, though they are no longer able to attend the scaled-down ceremony after it was moved indoors due to cold weather.
CHICAGO — Trump’s incoming border czar vows that the biggest city in the Midwest will be “ground zero” for mass deportations, and officials across the political spectrum in Chicago are bracing for a showdown.
On one end, Lincoln United Methodist Church, in the historically Hispanic Pilsen neighborhood, has canceled in-person Spanish services to protect its congregation from potential immigration roundups or targeted hate crimes. Worshippers can still access services online.
“I think people are scared right now for what is to come with the new administration,” the Rev. Tanya Lozano Washington said. “We’re doing everything we can to explore every single option to continue to protect our community members that are vulnerable.”
Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials were planning a major enforcement operation that would target people for several days after Trump’s inauguration, according to a document reviewed by NBC News and a person familiar with the planning. Tom Homan, the incoming border czar, said Saturday that the administration hadn’t “made a decision yet” after news of the planned operation began to leak.
Chicago will not be the first city to see mass deportations begin, two sources with knowledge of the plans told NBC News last night, after the operation in the city was postponed (but not canceled) because of media leaks.
Still, the fight over illegal immigration in Chicago has the potential to be among the fiercest nationwide during the initial weeks of Trump’s second term — and it could be a microcosm of an unprecedented ramp-up of immigration enforcement, one of the major themes of Trump’s 2024 campaign.
Read the full story here.
Keven McGinn from Tampa waits in line in the early hours of this morning as large crowds brave the cold waiting to get into Capital One Arena for Trump’s inauguration in Washington, D.C.
Trump’s burst of executive orders after being sworn in today will include declaring a national emergency aimed at boosting U.S. energy production by increasing drilling offshore and on federal lands and ending a freeze on natural gas exports, a source familiar with the matter confirmed to NBC News.
Axios was the first to report the expected energy-related orders.
With his political standing at an all-time high, Trump will take the oath of office today in the midst of a growing feud among congressional Republicans over how to deliver on his policy agenda.
GOP leaders on Capitol Hill say they will advance Trump’s sweeping plans for immigration, domestic energy and the tax code on party lines. That means squeezing them through the party’s wafer-thin House majority and complying with the arcane Senate budget process, in which cutting out Democrats and bypassing filibusters will require limiting the policies to spending and taxes.
“Very soon, we’ll begin the largest deportation operation in American history,” Trump said yesterday at a victory rally in Washington, where he alluded to the GOP’s narrow House majority. “And we’re going to end the Biden war on energy.”
While Trump promised to begin issuing a flurry of executive orders on day one, they will be constrained by the law and the courts. Making good on many of his promises will depend on action from Congress.
Read the full story here.
With just hours remaining in office, President Joe Biden issued a slew of pardons this morning to pre-emptively protect people Trump had threatened.
Biden pardoned former Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Mark Milley, Dr. Anthony Fauci, members and staff of the committee that investigated the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, and Capitol and D.C. Metropolitan police officers who testified in front of that committee.
Read the full story here.
Two centuries’ worth of political experience suggests Donald Trump should be sitting behind the lectern today watching someone else be sworn in rather than taking the oath himself.
He left the White House after leading a botched attempt to retain power despite his defeat in the 2020 election. Later, he was indicted four times and convicted of 34 felony counts in a New York criminal case that involved hush money payments to a porn star before the 2016 election.
When he announced three years ago that he would make one more run for the presidency, a normally friendly newspaper, the New York Post, dismissed his latest foray with the cheeky headline, “Florida Man Makes Announcement”; the story ran on page 26.
That was then. Trump, 78, will complete his improbable comeback at noon, becoming the first former president to lose re-election and return to power four years later since Glover Cleveland in 1893.
Read the full story here.
Trump plans to sign more than 50 executive orders today — and possibly more than 100 — on the first day of his second presidency, according to a person in his transition operation.
Trump, who is scheduled to take the oath of office inside the Capitol at noon, intends to sign several of the orders in front of a crowd at an event in Capital One Arena in Washington later in the afternoon. The inauguration-related events were moved to indoor locales because of inclement weather in the nation’s capital.
Read the full story here.
President-elect Donald Trump will be sworn into office today, making him the second president to serve two nonconsecutive terms and the first convicted felon.
The ceremony takes place midday in the Capitol Rotunda. Trump and Vice President-elect JD Vance will take their oaths of office at around noon ET. The ceremony traditionally marks the peaceful transfer of power from one administration to the next.
Inauguration festivities, though, will continue throughout the day.
Read more here.
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