It was a bitter 18 degrees Fahrenheit in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 20, 2025 when Donald J. Trump took the oath of office and became the 47th President of the United States—the coldest presidential inauguration since Reagan’s second in 1985. Given these conditions, organizers moved the ceremony inside to the U.S. Capitol rotunda instead of holding it on the West Front Lawn.
In Trump’s inaugural address, he asserted that America would experience a “revolution of common sense” in the next four years. He also promised a “tide of change” from the “decline” supposedly brought on by former President Joe Biden’s policies. “The golden age of America begins right now,” he stated. “From this day forward, our country will flourish and be respected again all over the world.”
The inauguration’s attendees included Trump’s family, political appointees—among them, Elon Musk—former presidents and vice presidents such as Barack Obama and Kamala Harris, as well as Big Tech executives such as Apple CEO Tim Cook, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, Google CEO Sundar Pichai, TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Five days prior, in his farewell address on Jan. 15, Biden warned that an “oligarchy is taking shape in America,” criticizing the Trump Administration’s collaboration with these tech executives.
Afterwards, Trump headed to the White House and began signing 26 executive orders. He granted clemency for 1,600 people involved in the 2021 Jan. 6 Capitol attack, ended birthright citizenship, proclaimed a “national emergency” on the southern border, withdrew from the Paris climate agreement, delayed enforcement of the federal TikTok ban, required federal departments to recognize gender as inseparable from one’s assigned sex at birth (Executive Order 14168), rolled back Biden’s environmental regulations and withdrew the U.S. from the World Health Organization among many other controversial decisions. Some of these orders are already being challenged in court, as several federal judges deem them “blatantly unconstitutional.”
Trump’s inauguration is—unsurprisingly—an incredibly polarizing subject matter for students at LOHS. On one hand, the president of the school’s Conservative Society (CS), senior Cora Brown, is strongly in support of him. “I appreciate how quickly [the Trump Administration] are to enact these executive orders and get things moving [in] their plan,” she said. CS Vice President Sichen Fan shares this enthusiasm, particularly regarding Trump’s stance on immigration. “I support his deportation policies,” shared Fan. “A lot of crime can be prevented through [Trump’s] proposed screening processes.”
On the other hand, LOHS’s Queer Student Alliance isn’t nearly as supportive. Nonbinary member Aspen Gross has many concerns regarding Executive Order 14168 and its ilk. “These regulations aim to erase [gender-nonconforming people],” they said. “We still exist even if the government doesn’t want to accept that . . . We just want to be safe, and Trump’s making that much harder.”
As Trump’s presidency continues to polarize the American people, LOHS’s Registrar Mrs. Kyllo encourages empathy and an acknowledgment of similarity. “All [Americans] more or less want the same things I think: freedom, security, equality, a good economy, good education—we all just don’t agree on how we’re going to get there,” she said. “But I think there’ll always be more that unites us as humans than divides us as citizens . . . We can’t forget that.”
