Donald Trump arrived in Washington on Saturday evening for a reception at one of his golf courses, kicking off four days of festivities that will culminate in his inauguration on Monday as the 47th President of the United States.
Before arriving with his wife Melania and their son Barron from their fiefdom of Mar-a-Lago, Florida, he promised that he would sign a ‘record’ number of presidential decrees ‘immediately after’ taking the oath of office at the Capitol in the federal capital.
In a telephone interview with NBC News, the Republican billionaire, who is already president from 2017 to 2021 and who has made a resounding return to the top, mentioned a ‘range of at least’ a hundred of these decrees, which are the prerogatives of the executive branch.
Deporting millions of illegal immigrants, raising tariffs against neighbours Mexico and Canada and rival China, deregulating the energy and climate sectors, pardoning his supporters for storming the Capitol in January 2021: Donald Trump has repeatedly promised to undo what was built by the government of his enemy, Democratic President Joe Biden, who leaves office at midday on Monday.
‘As soon as I am sworn in, I will launch the largest deportation programme in American history’, he said during his re-election campaign on 5 November.
The deportation of illegal immigrants -- estimated at around 11 million in a country of some 340 million inhabitants -- ‘will begin very, very quickly’, the tribune repeated on Saturday.
But he refused to ‘say in which cities, because things are moving’.
One of his right-hand men, Tom Homan, who is hostile to immigration and has been appointed ‘czar’ for border protection, spoke on Fox News on Friday of police operations, starting on Tuesday, to arrest and deport undocumented immigrants in Chicago, a Democratic megalopolis.
But this former director of the federal agency for border and immigration control (ICE) under the first Trump administration backed down on Saturday evening in the Washington Post: no ‘decision has been made yet’, even though ‘we will be arresting people all over the country’.
Against the second Trump administration, thousands of people -- many of them women -- demonstrated in Washington on Saturday, in a fine, cold rain.
Susan Dutwells, who had come from Florida with her daughter, expressed her ‘fear’ and ‘anger’ at the conservative's return to far-right rhetoric.
This ‘people's march’ was organised by groups defending civil liberties and social rights, including the team behind the ‘women's marches’ of 21 January 2017, which brought together hundreds of thousands of people in Washington the day after Mr Trump's first inauguration.
Eight years later, on 20 January, he will become the 47th President of the United States, the culmination of four days of festivities, albeit disrupted by polar temperatures (between -12°C and -6°C).
It is therefore inside the Capitol, under its rotunda, and not outside on its steps, that Donald Trump will take the oath of office.
‘I think we made the right decision (...) It would have been a risk for a lot of people’, the 78-year-old explained on NBC News.
On Saturday evening, he gave his first reception, with fireworks, at one of his golf courses in Virginia, a state bordering the federal capital.
Donald Trump is expected to visit Arlington Military Cemetery on Sunday morning, just across the Potomac River from Washington, before a meeting at the Capital One Arena, a large sports and concert venue for his supporters.
It is in this 20,000-seat venue that his inauguration will be broadcast, before he joins the public for a speech.
The new President will then take part in three galas, among the dozen or so parties planned in the city on Monday evening.
The four days of festivities will end on Tuesday morning at Washington Cathedral.
With AFP.
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