He made the gesture while thanking supporters for contributing to Trump's victory.

Trump's promise to usher in a 'golden age' for crypto is a sharp contrast from his predecessor.

Dozens of people gathered at a park near central Washington, DC to protest a wide range of issues.

It is only Donald Trump’s first day back in office as US president, but he has given a clear preview of what to expect.

Trump assumes office at an indoor inauguration ceremony, while supporters gather at the Capital One Arena to celebrate.

The White House announces a "national energy emergency" to reverse US climate regulations and boost oil and gas.

On the day of Donald Trump’s 2017 inauguration, a group of his top billionaire donors, including the casino magnate Miriam Adelson and the future Republican National Committee finance chair Todd Ricketts, hosted a small private party, away from the publicly advertised inaugural balls.

It was the sort of event that carried no interest at the time for the Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. He greeted Trump’s first presidency by publicly identifying his wife’s parents and his own ancestors with the immigrants targeted by Trump’s early executive orders. “These issues are personal for me,” Zuckerberg wrote in a public letter of concern a week after Trump took office.

But this month, as the same donors made plans for Trump’s second inauguration, Zuckerberg successfully maneuvered to become a co-host of their black-tie event, scheduled for tonight. The party quickly became one of the most sought-after gatherings of the weekend, overwhelming organizers with RSVPs from people who had not received invitations.

Even more striking: Zuckerberg sat in front of Trump’s incoming Cabinet in the Capitol Rotunda at his inauguration—at the personal invitation of Trump himself, according to two people briefed on the plans who, like some other sources interviewed for this story, requested anonymity to describe private conversations. (A spokesperson for Meta declined to comment.)

[Charlie Warzel: We’re all trying to find the guy who did this]

Zuckerberg was not alone. Trump’s inauguration events featured a Silicon Valley smorgasbord, with leaders from Apple, Google, and TikTok in attendance, as well as Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and Tesla’s Elon Musk. Several of the tech moguls also joined a small prayer service this morning at St. John’s Episcopal Church. Later, they blended in with the Trump clan directly behind the incoming president as he officially assumed power just after noon, like honorary family members.

The scene announced a remarkable new dynamic in Washington: Far more so than in his first term, the ultra-wealthy—and tech billionaires in particular—are embracing Trump. And the new president is happy to entertain their courtship, setting up the possibility that Trump’s second turn in the White House could be shaped by person-to-person transactions with business and tech executives—a new kind of American oligarchy.

Eight years ago, Trump landed in Washington in a fit of defiance, denouncing in his inaugural address “the American carnage” wrought by “a small group in our nation’s capital.” Four years later, he left as an outcast, judged responsible for the U.S. Capitol riot and a haphazard attempt to undo the constitutional order. He returns this week with a clean sweep of swing states and the national popular vote, the loyal support of Republicans in Congress, and the financial backing of corporate donors who are expected to help the inaugural committee raise twice what it did in 2017. Organizers of the Women’s March, which stomped on Trump’s 2017 inauguration by sending hundreds of thousands of protesters to the streets, settled for a series of unremarkable Saturday gatherings. The Democratic opposition, which treated Trump’s first term as an existential threat, now lacks an evident strategy or leader.

Like nearly every entity that has tried and failed to bend Trump to its will—his party, his former rivals, his partners in Congress, and his former aides among them—the tech elites largely seem to have decided that they’re better off seeking Trump’s favor.

[Read: ‘If there’s one person who keeps their word, it’s Donald Trump’]   

Just months ago, Trump released a coffee-table photo book that included a pointed rant about Zuckerberg’s $420 million donation in 2020 to fund local election offices during the coronavirus pandemic, an undertaking that Trump called “a true PLOT AGAINST THE PRESIDENT.” “We are watching him closely,” Trump wrote of Zuckerberg, “and if he does anything illegal this time he will spend the rest of his life in prison.”

But since Trump’s victory, Zuckerberg has worked to get himself in the new president’s good graces. The Meta CEO traveled to Mar-a-Lago; added a Trump pal to his corporate board; extolled the importance of “masculine energy” on Joe Rogan’s podcast; abandoned the Meta fact-checking program, which MAGA world had viewed as biased; and personally worked with Trump to try to resolve a 2021 civil lawsuit over Facebook’s decision to ban him from the platform, a case that legal experts once considered frivolous.

Bezos, meanwhile, worried aloud in 2016 that Trump’s behavior “erodes our democracy around the edges” and spent his first term taking fire from the president for the aggressive reporting of The Washington Post, the newspaper that Bezos owns (and where, until recently, we both were reporters). Now Amazon, like Meta, has given $1 million to the 2025 inaugural committee, and the company recently announced it would release a documentary about, and produced by, the first lady, Melania Trump. Even Musk, who spent more than $250 million last year to elect Trump and now is one of his top advisers, called for the aging Trump to “sail into the sunset” as recently as 2022.

“In the first term, everybody was fighting me,” Trump marveled at a mid-December news conference. “In this term, everybody wants to be my friend.”

The sheer quantity of money flowing to, and surrounding, Trump has increased. In his first term, he assembled the wealthiest Cabinet in history; this time, his would-be Cabinet includes more than a dozen billionaires. Sixteen of his appointees come not just from the top one percent, but from the top one-ten-thousandth percent, according to the Public Citizen, a nonprofit consumer-advocacy organization. Democrats, too, have long kept their wealthiest donors close, inviting them in on policy discussions and providing special access, but never before have the nation’s wealthiest played such a central role in the formation of a new administration.

As recently as last week, before the inauguration proceedings were moved indoors because of cold weather, a donor adviser got a last-minute offer of $500,000 for four tickets, according to the person who fielded the call and had to gently decline the request. Trump’s 2017 committee raised $107 million, more than twice the 2013 record set by Barack Obama, and spent $104 million. So far this year, the 2025 inaugural committee is expected to raise at least $225 million and spend less than $75 million on the inaugural festivities, according to a person familiar with the plans. At least some of the unspent tens of millions could go to Trump’s presidential library, several people involved with fundraising told us.  

Trump’s first inauguration had all the markings of a hastily arranged bachelor party put on someone else’s credit card. Trump’s company and the 2017 inaugural committee ultimately paid $750,000 to the District of Columbia to settle claims of illegal payments, including allegations of inflated charges to a Washington hotel then owned by Trump. (Neither entity admitted wrongdoing.) This time, the inauguration organizers have been more disciplined, and donors have been eager to reward Trump’s victory.  

“People were prepared, so when he did win, Trump was looking for checks,” a person involved in all of the Trump campaigns and both inaugural events told us. “Once Elon got in there, that was kind of the holy water that allowed all the other tech guys to follow. They all followed each other like cattle.”

What wealthy donors could get in return for their support of Trump remains an open question. Zuckerberg’s, Bezos’s, and Musk’s federal business interests include rocket-ship and cloud-computing contracts, a federal investigation of Tesla’s auto-driving technology, a pending Federal Trade Commission lawsuit against Meta, and a separate antitrust case against Amazon. Just last week, the Securities and Exchange Commission sued Musk for allegedly failing to disclose his early stake in Twitter, the social-media giant he later took over and renamed X. (A lawyer for Musk has said he did “nothing wrong.”) When Trump promised in his inaugural address to “plant the Stars and Stripes on the planet Mars,” the cameras panned to Musk, whose SpaceX is racing Bezos’s Blue Origin; Musk raised both thumbs and mouthed “Yeah!” as he broke into an ebullient grin.

[Read: He’s no Elon Musk]

Existing federal ethics rules were not designed to address the possibility of the world’s wealthiest people padding the pockets of the first family through television rights or legal settlements. The Trump family’s recently announced cryptocurrency, $TRUMP, creates yet another way for the wealthy to invest directly in an asset to benefit the commander in chief. “There is no enforcement mechanism against the president under these laws,” Trevor Potter, a former general counsel for the late Arizona Senator John McCain’s campaign, told us.

Even as Silicon Valley elites try to ingratiate themselves with the incoming president, some of Trump’s populist supporters are murmuring that the emerging tech oligarchy is diluting the purity of the MAGA base. Steve Bannon, a former adviser to Trump who has clashed in recent weeks with Musk over immigration policy, has fashioned himself as the field general for a fight against the tech bros and their outsize influence on a president eager to cut deals.

“He’s got them on display as ‘I kicked their ass.’ I’m stunned that these nerds don’t get anything to be up there,” Bannon told us last week, referring to the tech leaders appearing in prime camera position at Trump’s inauguration. “It’s like walking into Teddy Roosevelt’s lodge and seeing the mounted heads of all the big game he shot.”

For now, the ragtag populist figures like Bannon who defined Trump’s early years in politics are still celebrating. Roger Stone, the convicted and subsequently pardoned Trump kibitzer, attended inauguration events in his anachronistic morning suit—with plans for evening white tie. The British MP Nigel Farage hosted a party Friday at the Hay-Adams hotel, while former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson managed to get a ticket for the U.S. Capitol Rotunda.

On Thursday, Bannon threw his own party, titled “Novus Ordo Seclorum,” or “A New Order of the Ages,” at Butterworth’s club on Capitol Hill. Drinks included, perhaps predictably, the Covfefe Martini (vodka, Fernet, espresso) and the Im-Peach This (gin, peach, Cocci Americano). Bannon arrived fashionably late and was followed from the moment he ducked through the door by a mob of iPhone documenters, and even a man with a flashbulb. He received an impromptu line of frenzied well-wishers that one British journalist quipped was “as if for the Queen.”

[Read: The MAGA honeymoon is over]

As seared foie gras and freshly shucked oysters moved through the room, Bannon urged his supporters to “set new lows tonight,” reminding them that once Trump took the oath of office on Monday, “then the real fun happens.”

“You have two to three days to get sober,” he exhorted. “Go for it!”

The tech barons also fanned out through the city in celebration. The next night, across town, Bezos and his fiancée, Lauren Sánchez, dined at Georgetown’s new hot spot, Osteria Mozza, sitting at a window table with leaders of the Post. On Saturday, Palantir and the PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel hosted a party at his Woodley Park mansion; a bow-tied and mop-topped Zuckerberg arrived before the sun had fully set. And yesterday, Trump called Musk up onstage during his pre-inauguration rally inside the Capital One Arena—“C’mere, Elon!” he growled—briefly ceding the spotlight to the Tesla executive and his young son X.

During the 2024 election, many liberals and some conservatives feared that Trump’s second term would usher in a new kind of American autocracy, à la Hungary. But on its first day, at least, Trump’s new administration seems, more than anything else, oligarchal—albeit one where the transactions mainly flow one way, at least so far.

“They’re lining up to obey in advance. because they think they’re buying themselves peace of mind,” Ruth Ben-Ghiat, an expert on authoritarianism who has been critical of Trump, told us. But, added Ben-Ghiat, who noted the overlap between autocracy and oligarchy: “They can give that million and everything can be fine—but the minute they displease Trump, he could come after them.”

The Capitol One Arena is rather dreary. The 27-year-old venue was considered so outdated—and the neighborhood around it so drab—that last year the owner of the Washington Capitals and Wizards threatened to move the teams to Virginia.

But today, the arena will be the unlikely venue where Donald Trump’s political powers and showman’s instincts will be placed on full display.

A tiny desk, affixed with the presidential seal and bathed in red, white, and blue lights, has been placed on a stage built in the center of the arena where—in lieu of a traditional inaugural parade—Trump will hold a rally this afternoon. That is where he is expected to sit and sign a slew of executive orders. His efforts to reshape national policy and presidential power will come not in a quiet Oval Office but in front of a raucous crowd of supporters.

Trump officially completed his stunning comeback by taking the oath of office just after noon today in the Rotunda of the U.S. Capitol. But his second term, in many ways, will truly begin a few hours later in that packed arena about a mile away. An executive producer at heart, Trump has always leaned on the power of imagery in cultivating political force. And in his inaugural address, he was stage-managing his sequel, a presidential spectacle that offered a preview of his plans for his second act.

There were few notes of unity.

“My recent election is a mandate to completely and totally reverse a horrible betrayal,” Trump said, “and all these many betrayals that have taken place, and give people back their faith, their wealth, their democracy, and indeed their freedom. From this moment on, America’s decline is over.”

The frigid temperatures gave Trump an excuse to move the inauguration inside, much as Ronald Reagan did in 1985, and they provided him with further control of the pageantry. By not braving the cold—and, to be clear, several inaugurations have been colder—Trump also dispensed with any focus on the size of his crowd, something that upset him deeply eight years ago.

Moreover, he was able to mark his return to power in the very space where a violent mob of his supporters tried to overturn an election to keep him in power. Four years ago, a crowd radicalized by lies of a stolen election stormed the U.S. Capitol and desecrated its Rotunda, committing acts of violence in Trump’s name. Today, official Washington used that same historic hall to welcome him back to power.

If Trump had delivered his speech in its customary outdoor location on the Capitol’s west front, the cheers from the crowd down on the mall below would have been distant. But the indoor setting invoked a State of the Union address, held annually just down the hall in the House of Representatives chamber. And Trump furthered that feeling with a partisan speech, pushing a litany of policy proposals. Reactions split along party lines, with Republicans repeatedly leaping to their feet to applaud and Democrats, including outgoing President Joe Biden, sitting silently.

Trump leaned into the visual messaging of the Capitol ceremony. For most people, seating charts are mundane, tiresome organizational tools. But they are prized in Washington for clues as to who’s up and who’s down, offering a literal map of proximity to power. The signals sent by Trump were clear: GOP donors and friends such as Miriam Adelson and Dana White were seated right behind the row for former presidents. His new tech-billionaire friends—Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg—got prime seats inside the Rotunda, in front of the incoming Cabinet, while a number of Republican governors, including Ron DeSantis of Florida, Glenn Youngkin of Virginia, and Brian Kemp of Georgia, were shoved to the overflow room.

Inauguration Day was designed to showcase democracy’s strength. Instead, the events of the day showed its inherent fragility. Biden provided Trump what Trump did not give him—a peaceful transfer of power with all the niceties of ceremony—but the outgoing president was so concerned about his successor exacting revenge that he issued extraordinary preemptive pardons to some government officials and members of his own family, which cut sharply against his pledge to restore democratic norms.

As his motorcade wound its way through Washington, Trump was surrounded by his own image. Many of those thronging the nation’s capital—even those shut out of the events by the weather-related scheduling changes—sported shirts and sweatshirts emblazoned with Trump’s mugshot taken at Fulton County Jail, in Atlanta, when he was charged in August 2023 with racketeering. At the time, that case in Georgia was just one of four criminal cases that imperiled Trump, though it was the only one that produced a booking photo quickly disseminated around the globe.

Many Democrats hoped it would doom Trump’s chances, undermining a campaign that was about retribution, yes, but also about keeping the candidate out of prison. But three of the cases fell by the wayside, derailed by stalling tactics, prosecutorial blunders, and a helpful Supreme Court ruling on presidential immunity. And the one case that did move forward—the hush-money trial in New York—ended with a conviction that will be recorded in the history books but meant little else.

Trump has mused that the legal proceedings created images that reinforced his claim to be a victim of a government overreach, the subject of a witch hunt, a martyr taking arrows for his supporters. Throughout the race, he used those visuals to recast political vulnerabilities as visceral symbols of toughness and power. Day after day, the Republicans flocked to the courthouse—sometimes in matching red ties—to demonstrate their fealty. And many in the GOP saw his mugshot not as a sign of wrongdoing or guilt, but as an image of strength and defiance. He used it for countless fundraising appeals and merchandising opportunities.

That wasn’t an accident. In the weeks before Trump’s own arraignment, he saw the case’s other defendants pose for unflattering booking photos that looked washed-out and weak. So Trump practiced various facial expressions, one of his advisers told me on condition of anonymity to discuss private moments. He eventually settled on a scowl, matching his first instinct. And then in the booking room, Trump told confidants later, he saw where the light was coming from and positioned his face, frowning and leaning forward, half in the shadows and half in the full glare.

Trump loved the result. And when it came time to pose for photos for the official inaugural program, he re-created it, his adviser told me. Vice President J. D. Vance’s portrait looks like most official portraits: a pleasant closed-mouth smile, plenty of light illuminating his face. Trump instead asked for an extreme close-up, like his booking photo, with his face somewhat in shadow, glaring at the audience. The photo shaved years off his 78-year-old face and projected a strongman’s toughness.

The other image that defined the 2024 campaign was captured moments after an assassin’s bullet grazed Trump’s ear during a campaign stop in Butler County, Pennsylvania. With blood from his wounded ear streaking across his face, Trump had the showman’s presence of mind to stop the Secret Service agents trying to hustle him to safety. He stood tall, pumped his fist at the roaring crowd, and yelled, “Fight, fight, fight!” It was moment of inspiration—captured in a series of instantly famous photographs—and, for Trump loyalists, perfectly showcased a political survivor.

John F. Kennedy was considered the originator of modern presidential iconography, while Reagan enhanced it. But even more than his glamorous predecessors, Trump knows that the pictures matter far more than the substance. His whole political career has been built around imagery. It was launched on the back of The Apprentice, the highly stylized version of his business career that exaggerated his success and made him America’s CEO.

After he was elected, I saw his skill at stagecraft firsthand while covering his White House. Some images he created were meant for the history books, such as when he left those of us in the press pool behind to step over the border at the DMZ and into North Korea, becoming the first U.S. president to set foot in the hermit-like nation. Others were more mundane: During an Oval Office interview ahead of the 2018 midterms, Trump stopped the questions to make sure the photographer had the most flattering lighting. He held up his hand, and issued instructions.

“Let’s make sure this looks the way it should,” Trump said, unsmiling, while directing the angle and illumination of the photos.

That same attention to the power of political imagery was on display again in Washington today, from the Capitol Rotunda to the Capitol One Arena. Moments after completing his inaugural address, Trump spoke to the overflow room and began by praising the stagecraft of the ceremony.

“It was so beautiful in there today that maybe we should do it every four years,” said Trump, who added that the Rotunda featured “the best acoustics I’ve ever heard in a room.”

He smiled at the camera.

During his inauguration address US President Donald Trump outlined a series of executive actions.