When does Donald Trump take office? Inauguration Day 2025 dates to know, tickets
President-elect Donald Trump is returning to the White House this month.
After Trump won the 2024 election against Democrat Vice President Kamala Harris in November, his inauguration is set to occur in a matter of weeks. Trump becomes the second president in the U.S. to win two non-consecutive terms, following Grover Cleveland.
Trump will also be the third president sworn into office on Martin Luther King Jr. Day.
The only step between Trump’s inauguration is for Harris to count the votes on Jan. 6, alongside archivist of the United States Collen Shogan.
Here’s everything you need to know about how to watch the inauguration, whether live in D.C. or from your screens.
The final step of an election involves members of Congress counting the electoral votes that were voted on and turned in to Congress in December. These votes represent all the electorate votes of each state.
As president of the Senate and archivist of the United States, Kamala Harris and Collen Shogan, respectively, will oversee the vote count. After the effort to overturn the 2020 election, the Electoral Count Reform Act also introduced a series of reforms to this joint session.
These include a clarification that the vice president's role as president of the Senate is "ministerial" in overseeing the count, and the threshold for objections to a state's electoral slates was raised to one-fifth of each chamber.
Inauguration Day will occur on Monday, Jan. 20. The Inauguration traditionally happens on Jan. 20 following the November election. Unless Jan. 20 falls on a Sunday, which will reschedule the event for Jan. 21.
Per tradition, Vice President-elect JD Vance will be sworn in first, and Trump will recite the Presidential Oath at around 11 a.m. CT.
Similarly, because Martin Luther King Jr. Day is always celebrated on the third Monday of January, this marks the third time a president has taken the Oath of Office on the holiday and the first exchange of power.
The Joint Congressional Committee on Inaugural Ceremonies offers a limited number of inauguration tickets to the public through members of Congress. Tickets are free and allow you to watch the proceedings from the U.S. Capitol.
Tickets will be available by asking your Congressional members in the weeks leading up to the inauguration.
This article originally appeared on Oklahoman: When does Trump take office in 2025? How to watch inauguration events
A new Donald Trump era: Congress to certify election victory four years after Jan. 6 riot
WASHINGTON – No one expects an angry mob to show up this time.
Four years to the day that supporters of Donald Trump attacked the U.S. Capitol and tried to halt the certification of the 2020 election, Congress will usher in a new Trump era on Monday when it gathers to count each state’s electoral votes and officially declare him the winner of last year’s presidential contest.
This time, the proceeding is expected to go off smoothly. No rioters storming the Capitol. No one pushing past police barricades and beating officers with makeshift weapons. No lawmakers running through the Capitol’s corridors in fear of their lives. No sitting president pressuring a vice president to thwart the process.
“I think it will almost be a nonevent,” predicted Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn.
The difference between then and now is Trump.
Four years ago, the Republican refused to acknowledge he lost to Democrat Joe Biden, claiming the 2020 election was tainted by widespread fraud.
On Jan. 6, 2021, the day Congress was to certify the results of that election, Trump held a rally on the Ellipse with the White House in the background and urged thousands of his supporters to march down Pennsylvania Avenue to the Capitol and “fight like hell.” They did, setting in motion the most violent attack against the seat of government since the War of 1812.
But Trump eagerly embraced the results of last year’s election after he won both the popular vote and the Electoral College over the Democratic nominee, Vice President Kamala Harris. Though Trump had again warned of the possibility of election fraud, he went suddenly silent about those dire predictions after his victory.
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Congressional Democrats are not expected to challenge the election results when they gather to certify them on Monday.
“I think it’s safe to say that even the Democrats heard from the American people that this is what they wanted,” said Sen. Markwayne Mullin, R-Okla.
Even so, hanging over the certification process will be unsettling memories of the assault on the Capitol, uncertainty over whether Trump will follow through on his promise to pardon those involved and questions of how the Jan. 6, 2021 attack will be viewed through the broader lens of history.
“For a significant chunk of the population, including me, it will be remembered as a frightening attempt to use force to overrule the results of a presidential election,” said Alexander Keyssar, a Harvard professor who taught a class on the Jan. 6 attacks.
For a different segment of the population, “it may be remembered as a day of courage and heroism,” Keyssar said.
Either way, Trump, who was impeached twice during his first term, will immediately earn a couple of places in the history books when he begins his second term on Jan. 20. He will be the first president since Grover Cleveland to leave office in defeat and return four years later. He also will become the first president to enter office with a criminal record after his conviction in New York last May on 34 felonies involving hush-money payments to a porn star.
Trump was indicted on federal charges tied to his mishandling of classified documents after he left office and his efforts to overturn the 2020 election leading up to the attack on the Capitol. But three weeks after last year’s election, a judge acting on the request of special counsel Jack Smith dismissed the charges that Trump tried to steal the election in 2020. Smith also effectively ended the classified documents case by dropping his appeal of a separate judge’s dismissal of those charges.
Federal prosecutors did win the conviction of more than 1,000 people who were involved in the Jan. 6 attack. At least 645 were jailed and another 145 were serving home detention as of Dec. 6, according to the Justice Department.
Trump has vowed repeatedly for years to pardon defendants charged in the attack, leading some to ask judges to postpone trials, sentencings or incarceration until after he is inaugurated.
Some defendants have asked permission to attend the inauguration while awaiting trial.
Tommy Tatum of Mississippi, who was charged with using a flagpole to intimidate police at the Capitol, asked the court to let him travel to Washington on Jan. 6 to attend a news conference and on Jan. 20 to attend the inauguration.
“The Government is punishing Mr. Tatum by preventing him from attending a press conference as a journalist and from expressing his support for President Trump by attending his inauguration, clearly in violation of Mr. Tatum’s First Amendment rights,” Tatum’s lawyers wrote in their request.
“There is no legitimate government objective to prevent Mr. Tatum from visiting D.C.,” the lawyers argued.
U.S. District Judge John Bates of the District of Columbia denied Tatum’s request, saying his alleged conduct on Jan. 6 was “particularly violent.”
The travel restriction is necessary to ensure community safety, Bates wrote.
Trump hasn’t spelled out what he will do. He voiced sympathy during the campaign for nonviolent offenders and decried long sentences. But he hasn’t detailed how he would weigh pardons for nearly 1,600 people charged and 1,000 people convicted in the riot, which has left his allies and critics waiting to see what he will do on his first day in office.
“The moment we win, we will rapidly review the cases of every political prisoner unjustly victimized by the Harris regime, and I will sign their pardons on Day One,” he told a Wisconsin rally in September.
For Trump, pardoning the defendants would amount to the concluding chapter of the Jan. 6 saga, said Julian Zelizer, a history professor at Princeton University and the author of a book on Trump’s first term as president.
“He survived all the prosecutions, and he survived the electoral threat that that posed to his future and to the MAGA future,” Zelizer said. “Then he won reelection, and he won it with the popular vote and with all the swing states. A pardon is the final step, saying, ‘You’re free.’”
Congressional Democrats warn pardoning those involved in the Jan. 6 insurrection would send the wrong message.
“The pardon power should be used to correct procedural or substantive injustices,” said Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., and a former professor of constitutional law.
“No one has identified any injustice in the prosecution of people who violently assaulted police officers, who were engaged in seditious conspiracy, which means conspiracy to overthrow the government of the United States,” Raskin said. “I would view the promise of pardoning hundreds of convicted insurrectionists as a continuation of the assault on American constitutional democracy.”
Rep. Seth Magaziner, D-R.I., said granting a pardon to the Jan. 6 defendants, particularly those who committed acts of violence, would send a signal that “violent law-breaking will be allowed as long as it is done under a MAGA banner.”
“That would open the floodgates to chaos all across the country because there will be a whole lot of people out there, including deranged and violent individuals, who think that Donald Trump will give them a ‘Get Out of Jail Free’ card,” Magaziner said.
Magaziner said he recognizes the vast majority of Trump supporters are peaceful, patriotic Americans, “but we're not talking about peaceful patriotic Americans when we talk about the Jan. 6 rioters. We’re talking about criminals and many of whom committed acts of violence.”
For some lawmakers, Trump’s threats to investigate, prosecute and imprison his perceived enemies are another cause for alarm. During a December interview with NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Trump said members of a congressional committee that spent 18 months investigating his role in the Jan. 6 insurrection should go to jail.
That’s not how government works, Raskin said.
“The whole point of the American Constitution is we have no kings here,” Raskin said. “We have no monarchs. We have no queens, no emperors. We don't put people in jail because the president doesn't like them.”
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Trump’s return to power will likely result in a revisionist history in terms of how Jan. 6 is remembered among a segment of the American electorate, Keyssar said. In Trump’s view and that of many of his supporters, he said, Trump's victory in November validated many of his grievances about the 2020 election.
“There's a large segment of the American population which equates democracy as the protection of the rights and powers for some people but not others – and, thus, it was legitimate to have this attack on the (election) procedures because the procedures were leading to the wrong outcome,” Keyssar said.
In many ways, Keyssar said, it’s reminiscent of how regional differences shaped Americans’ understanding of the Civil War for more than a century and, in some cases, even today.
“In the South,” he said, “they continue to call it the war of northern aggression.”
Four years after his supporters invaded the US Capitol, Trump is more powerful than ever
Late on a day of chaos and blood on January 6, 2021, it was unimaginable that Donald Trump — who summoned a mob to Washington and told the crowd to “fight like hell” — would get anywhere near the presidency again.
Yet on Monday, exactly four years after his supporters invaded the US Capitol, beat up police officers and interrupted the certification of President Joe Biden’s 2020 victory, Congress will convene to again confirm another election.
The democracy that Trump tried to desecrate will enshrine his return to power.
A joint session of Congress to count the electoral votes from his November victory will rekindle chilling memories of the horror and fear felt by anyone who was in the US Capitol four years ago.
The ceremonial process that will clear the way for Trump’s swearing in as the 47th president in two weeks will also highlight an extraordinary moment in political history in a nation where Trump is more powerful and popular than he’s ever been. A plurality of voters decided that despite his egregious conduct four years ago, he was the best option to lead the country until January 2029.
January 6, 2025, will mark the most stunning political comeback in US history, and will usher in a new administration that could feature the president-elect’s most extreme stress test of the Constitution so far.
It will also underscore the Democratic Party’s failures in convincing voters that Trump represents a mortal threat to the country’s democracy and that they had the answers to Americans’ economic struggles and concerns over immigration.
Americans made a choice in November, and even though he conjured a day of infamy four years ago, they picked Trump.
The congressional certification of Trump’s victory — over which his vanquished opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris, will preside — will reward an extraordinary effort by the ex-president, his supporters and the conservative media machine to whitewash what happened on one of the darkest days in US history.
Trump, with a storm of misinformation, has convinced millions of Americans of his lie about the 2020 election being stolen. Republicans have rebranded the January 6 rioters as “tourists,” persecuted victims and heroes, despite the hundreds of convictions handed down by courts. Trump has promised to pardon those found guilty over the attack. He launched his 2024 campaign with a recording of the National Anthem by the “J6 choir,” sung by prisoners jailed for their role in the riot. And he rebranded January 6, 2021, a “beautiful day” and a “day of love.”
This could hardly be more misleading. The truth of January 6 was told in shocking details by witnesses and law enforcement officers to a congressional select committee when the House was still under Democratic control. “It was carnage. It was chaos,” said Caroline Edwards, a Capitol Police officer whose testimony was interspersed with footage of her being knocked unconscious by Trump’s supporters and who described slipping on the spilled blood of her colleagues. “I am not combat trained, and on that day it was just hours of hand-to-hand combat,” Edwards said in June 2022.
While this was unfolding, senators and representatives were running for their lives, Trump’s supporters breached the Senate chamber and Secret Service agents hustled then-Vice President Mike Pence to safety as the crowd chanted for him to be hanged.
But by shrugging off his second impeachment over January 6, 2021, reestablishing his dominance over the GOP and winning a subsequent election despite multiple criminal indictments, Trump avoided paying a meaningful political price for his assault on democracy. When he won a nonconsecutive second term, he went from being a political aberration to one of the most significant figures in American history. Along the way, he skillfully portrayed attempts to bring him to justice for his transgressions as persecution, creating a political rallying effect. He’ll return to the White House as an even more powerful leader, thanks to a Supreme Court ruling arising from one of his legal cases that gives the president substantial criminal immunity for official acts committed while in office.
Most profoundly, Trump will send a message down through the ages that a president who refuses to accept the result of a free and fair election and who incites an attack on the Capitol can get away with it — and regain power.
Yet, the process of certifying Trump’s election win will also be a reaffirmation of democracy. And Biden and Harris, in one of their final acts in office, are restoring a tradition of smooth handoffs between administrations denied to them by Trump.
Biden said Sunday this had been deliberate.
“If you notice, I’ve reached out to, to make sure the smooth transition. We’ve got to get back to the basic, normal transfer of power,” the president told reporters at the White House.
In a Washington Post op-ed published Sunday evening, he also warned of the dangers of forgetting what happened four years ago.
“An unrelenting effort has been underway to rewrite — even erase — the history of that day. To tell us we didn’t see what we all saw with our own eyes. To dismiss concerns about it as some kind of partisan obsession. To explain it away as a protest that just got out of hand,” Biden wrote without naming Trump.
“And we should commit to remembering Jan. 6, 2021, every year. To remember it as a day when our democracy was put to the test and prevailed. To remember that democracy — even in America — is never guaranteed,” he continued, adding that he has invited his successor to the White House on the morning of January 20 and that he will be attending Trump’s inauguration.
Unlike in 2020, the losers — this time, the Democrats — have not lied about election fraud, drawn up alternative slates of electors or called for a crowd to come to Washington to protest false claims of a stolen election.
“He led an insurrection, but the people have now voted and our job tomorrow, which is also January 6, is to implement the will of the people,” Democratic Sen. Amy Klobuchar told CNN’s Jake Tapper on “State of the Union” on Sunday. “It’s the peaceful transition of power. So, Democrats and Republicans will come together tomorrow to certify those results … that’s what we do. That’s what America has done, and that’s what we will do on the Inauguration Day.”
The electoral certification of Trump’s win will be a bitter moment for Democrats. And it will highlight the party’s painful reality that it couldn’t produce a candidate in 2024 to beat a twice-impeached, four-times-indicted, once-convicted ex-president who tried to burn down democracy to stay in power.
If the core purpose of Biden’s 2020 campaign was to purge Trump from American political life, then his presidency was a failure, whatever other achievements burnish his legacy. Biden’s decision to run for reelection, which came disastrously unstuck in a CNN debate that laid bare the brutal reality of his diminished capacity, helped set Democrats up for failure. And Harris’ inability to coin a convincing case for how she’d help Americans at a time of high prices and economic insecurity opened the door to Trump’s return to the Oval Office. She never sufficiently distanced herself from the Biden administration’s failure to secure the border or its insistence that an inflationary crisis was merely “transitory.”
Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said in an interview on CBS’ “Face the Nation” on Sunday that voters hadn’t ignored what happened on January 6, 2021, but had made a judgment on what was most important to them. “I wouldn’t say that the American people disregarded this. They just had a different view as to what was in their interest, economically and the rest,” the California Democrat said.
Trump, with his searing anti-immigration rhetoric, succeeded in painting his chaotic presidency as a kind of lost golden age, despite the scenes of violence and lawlessness that he conjured at its end
The country indisputably took a step to the right in the 2024 election, toward Trump’s populist nationalism, even in many blue-leaning districts and cities. Trump won all seven swing states and became the first Republican since 2004 to win the popular vote, even if he fell marginally below a majority of votes cast. His claims of a historic mandate are exaggerated, but that’s unlikely to thwart his promise to use power to mount a mass deportation of undocumented immigrants, wreak revenge on his political enemies and attempt a crackdown on the media. Republicans now control both the House and the Senate and will have the backstop of an often-supportive Supreme Court majority.
Trump’s triumph has left Democrats adrift, seeking a new message and wondering how they can connect with working Americans again. And the party is facing the reality that a plurality of voters preferred a former president who tried to destroy democracy to stay in power to their candidate. Sufficient voters seemed to decide that they’d prefer a strongman who better voiced their grievances than an alternative who warned that Trump was a threat to democracy.
With their warnings about Trump’s threat to constitutional values, Democrats found themselves in the position of defending a government and an establishment in which many Americans had lost faith, after years of foreign wars and the hollowing out of the blue-collar industrial economy.
This sense of the end of an ancient regime was reflected Saturday when Biden made the latest of his postelection jabs at Trump. He awarded Presidential Medals of Freedom to recipients whom many Democrats see as embodying the democratic order that Trump repudiates. They included former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who lost to Trump in 2016. Biden also posthumously recognized assassinated former Democratic presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, whose vaccine-skeptic son split with Democrats and his family and is Trump’s controversial choice to lead the Health and Human Services Department. He also awarded the medal to former Michigan Gov. George Romney, a Republican and the late father of former Utah Sen. Mitt Romney, one of Trump’s last and most prominent critics in the GOP.
After the ceremony, Biden implied that despite Trump’s imminent arrival in the White House, the fight to save democracy would go on. “Let’s remember, our sacred effort continues, and to keep going, as my mother would say, we have to keep the faith,” he said.
The party that once prided itself on defending global democracy has, however, long since moved on, profiting from its denial of the events of January 6, 2021, which has helped Republicans vault back to power.
Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson, keeping the gavel in a razor-thin victory on Friday, is already laying the groundwork to implement Trump’s ambitious agenda of strict immigration enforcement, tax cuts and slashes to the size of the federal government despite his tiny House majority.
Johnson has also changed his mind on the urgency of upholding the certification of electoral votes.
Four years ago, he was a key player in Trump’s attempts to subvert the result of a democratic election. Even after the bloody riot, the Louisiana Republican voted against the awarding of electoral votes to Biden in Pennsylvania and Arizona based on false claims of election fraud.
Now, however, he says nothing must get in the way of enshrining Trump’s win.
“We got a big snow storm coming to DC, and we encourage all of our colleagues, do not leave town, stay here, because, as you know, the Electoral Count Act requires this on January 6, at 1 p.m. so whether we’re in a blizzard or not, we are going to making sure this is done,” he told Fox News on Sunday.
“We cannot delay that certification.”
