Trump breaks with tradition at his inauguration

Nowhere was this more obvious than in the selection of words that had never appeared previously in any US inaugural address.

The new president struck a defiant tone: “From this day forward it’s going to be only America First.” Thousands of people had gathered on the National Mall despite rain to listen to what transpired to be a stirring call for national unity and patriotism.

Trump accused previous US administrations of enriching Washington at the expense of struggling American families, with Obama, the Clintons and two other former presidents in the audience. The Clintons looked glum.

Foreign industry had been enriched at the expense of American companies, Trump noted. He added that the US had also subsidised the militaries of other countries while letting the US military become depleted, and trillions had been spent abroad while allowing domestic infrastructure to crumble.

“The wealth of our middle class has been ripped from their homes and then redistributed across the entire world,” he said.

Some of the Trump lexicon included: bleed, carnage, depletion, disrepair, flush, Islamic, ripped, sad, rusted, sprawl, stealing, stolen, subsidized, tombstones, trapped, trillions, unstoppable.

Trump advisor Carl Icahn, told CNBC, “Donald surprised me coming on so strongly about the establishment. I admire him for doing that.”

Icahn, Trump’s special advisor on regulatory reform, said he expected the 45th president of the United States to take a somewhat confrontational approach. Yet he welcomed it as a good thing because it will promote change.

“I admire him for not just trying to say, ‘Wow. Let’s smooth it over. Let’s be buddies.’ I mean, he came on extremely strongly and he’s giving you a look at what the future, I think, is going to be,” Icahn added.

“I think you have to break up this establishment. You have to stop the perception which we have in this country that the government is at war with business, that the government doesn’t like business and that’s what you’ve had for eight years with Obama,” Icahn said.

President Donald Trump wasted no time getting to work on Friday night, heading straight to the Oval Office where he signed his first executive orders since arriving at the White House.

He signed an order to confirm General James Mattis as Secretary of Defense and another order to “ease the burden of Obamacare” straight off the bat.

Trump has already made changes to the Oval Office decor, swapping its formerly crimson drapes for gold curtains and putting back in its former place a bust of former British prime minister Winston Churchill. Barack Obama had replaced the bust of Winston Churchill with one of Martin Luther King.

Only John F Kennedy and Jimmy Carter had shorter inaugural speeches than Trump, but he set a record with the amount of prayers during his inaugural ceremonies.

The day started at St. John’s Church with a service at 8:30 a.m., followed by six religious prayers as part of the ceremony, three invocations and three benedictions.

The president was sworn in using both his own Bible, gifted to him by his mother, and the Bible used to swear in President Abraham Lincoln.

Meanwhile orchestrated protests against the Republican president turned ugly in downtown Washington. Protesters, many paid, smashed shop windows, blocked traffic and battled police in riot gear who had to respond with tear gas and stun grenades. Police confirmed that more than 200 people were arrested.

Estimates of Friday’s crowd at the inauguration were not immediately available from police.

The Rasmussen Reports daily Presidential Tracking Poll for Friday shows that 56 percent of Americans approved of Trump’s job performance so far and only forty-four percent disapprove.

Eighty-five percent of Republicans and 55 percent of unaffiliated voters had a positive view while seventy percent of Democrats disapproved.