Trump's inauguration ceremony in the US Capitol on January 20 was marked by the presence of some of the wealthiest men in the world. On the crowded dias were Elon Musk, a former Democrat who spent a quarter of a billion dollars for Trump's election, Meta's Mark Zuckerberg, Amazon's Jeff Bezos, Europe's wealthiest man Bernard Arnault, India's Mukesh Ambani, and Apple Chief Executive Tim Cook. They were joined by billionaire Cabinet nominees Howard Lutnick (Commerce nominee) and Scott Bessent (Treasury nominee).

Lutnick, in a speech on Monday at the Capital One Arena where Trump's supporters had gathered to watch the swearing-in, said, "The man is power." Musk spoke after Lutnick and said he would help Trump usher in a "golden age in America" to thunderous applause.

Commenting on the spectacle, the Democratic National Committee said that by "leaving his own supporters literally out in the cold while billionaires worth over $1 trillion got a front row seat," the President was showing he would always "he'll put himself and his ultra-wealthy backers ahead of the American people."

The American people got a taste of Trump's plainly illegal actions on his first day in office. He signed a flurry of executive orders overriding orders issued by the outgoing Biden administration. On January 21, President Trump's executive order to end birthright citizenship faced a barrage of legal challenges from several states and civil rights groups.

A coalition of 18 states filed a lawsuit in Massachusetts saying the birthright citizenship executive order violates the constitutional rights of thousands of children and imposes undue costs on local jurisdictions that would lose federal funding tied to Medicaid and children's health insurance.

In addition, the American Civil Liberties Union and the Lawyers for Civil Rights filed separate legal challenges in New Hampshire and Massachusetts on behalf of parents whose children would not be eligible for citizenship under Trump's order.

"Denying citizenship to US born children is not only unconstitutional - it is reckless and ruthless repudiation of American values," said Anthony D Romero, Executive Director of the American Civil Liberties Union, in an interview with the Washinton Post.

On Thursday, a federal judge temporarily blocked President Trump's executive order to end automatic citizenship for babies born on American soil. In a hearing held on Thursday, Federal District Court Judge John C Coughenour agreed with four states that sued. "This is a blatantly unconstitutional order ...I have difficulty understanding how a member of the bar would state unequivocally that this is a constitutional order," he told Trump administration lawyers.

Trump's scrapping of sanctions on violent Jewish extremists in the occupied West Bank came as dozens of settlers on January 19 rampaged through the Palestinian village in protest against the Israel-Hamas ceasefire. The lifting of sanctions means that President Trump has decided to take a strong pro-Israeli stand in the conflict between Israel and Hamas.

Trump also restored sanctions against the International Court of Justice, which has issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former Defence Minister for crimes against humanity and war crimes.

A Trump decision to suspend all US foreign aid for 90 days will also adversely affect Palestinians since US donations form a significant share of the budget of various aid organisations.

During his first administration, Trump had declared the Jewish settlements in the West Bank as legal, recognised Israel's claim to the Syrian Golan Heights and unveiled a peace initiative that assigned the majority of the contested city of Jerusalem to Israel. Trump has described the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a real estate dispute!

In the White House on inauguration day, he said about Gaza and the West Bank, "It is a phenomenal location, on the sea, the best weather, some beautiful things can be done with it."

Within hours of taking over as the 47th President of the United States on Monday, January 20, Trump granted pardons to more than 1,500 of his supporters who stormed the Capitol in a bid to stall congressional certification of Joe Biden's election victory. He also commuted the sentences of 14 far-right Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers Militia members.

Three federal judges on Wednesday strongly condemned President Donald Trump's sweeping pardons of supporters who stormed the US Capitol four years ago in an attempt to overrun the results of the 2020 election.

"No pardon can change the tragic truth of what happened on January 6, 2021, "District Judge Tanya Chutkan said in an order dismissing charges against a Capitol riot defendant. "It cannot whitewash the blood, faces and terror that the mob left in its wake. And it cannot repair the jagged breach in America's sacred tradition of peacefully transitioning power."

Chutkan presided over the criminal case filed against Trump by special counsel Jack Smith, who accused him of seeking to overturn the results of the 2020 election. The case never came to trial, and it was dismissed after Trump won the November election, in line with a long-standing Justice Department policy of not prosecuting a sitting President.

Two other Washington-based federal judges who presided over cases involving Capitol riot defendants also dismissed the charges on Wednesday with strongly worded condemnations of the pardons. District Judge Beryl Howell said there was no factual basis for dismissing the charges against two of the defendants before her court, only an assertion by the Trump White House that a "grave national injustice" had been done.

"No 'national injustice' occurred here, just as no outcome - determinative election fraud occurred in the 2020 presidential election," Howell said, adding that "poor losers cannot be allowed to disrupt the peaceful transfer of power with impunity. That merely raises the dangerous sector of future lawless conduct by other poor losers and undermines the rule of law."

District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly said the dismissal of charges and pardons "will not change the truth of what happened on January 6, 2021. What occured that day is preserved for the future through thousands of contemporaneous videos, transcripts of trials, jury verdicts, and judicial opinions. Those records are immutable and represent the truth, no matter how the events of January 6 are described by those charged or their allies."

Trump has repeatedly played down the violence of January 6, even describing it as a 'day of love.' More than 140 police officers were injured in hours of clashes with rioters wielding flagpoles, baseball bats, hockey sticks and other makeshift weapons, along with tasers and canisters of bear spray.

The Capitol assault followed a fiery speech by then-President Trump to thousands of his supporters near the White House in which he claimed the 2020 election was stolen and exhorted the crowd to march on Congress.