Trump treated Inauguration Day like an episode of reality TV. It’s why Biden got fired
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Trump’s willingness to speak to the press shows he understands the modern media environment in a way his predecessor never did, Andrew Feinberg writes. With a stroke of a giant Sharpie, Donald Trump on Monday began the work of systematically dismantling anything and everything that his predecessor built over the previous four years — and he turned it into reality TV.
![[The press spent nearly an hour in the Oval Office to watch Donald Trump sign executive orders and take questions on Inauguration Day]](https://static.independent.co.uk/2025/01/21/17/SEI236755426.jpg)
First, during a raucous indoor parade that looked more like a campaign rally than an inaugural celebration, then during a marathon signing session with media in the Oval Office, Trump issued a series of executive orders and presidential proclamations that were meant to repeal and repudiate everything that transpired between January 20, 2021, and his White House return. He rolled back 78 separate Biden-era executive actions, including restarting the withdrawal of the United States from the Paris Climate Accords and the World Health Organization.
![[Trump holds up an executive order after signing it at a raucous parade event on Inauguration Day]](https://static.independent.co.uk/2025/01/21/11/SEI236754681.jpg)
Trump also ordered an end to the Biden administration’s efforts to recognize transgender and nonbinary people in government documents, directed federal workers to be ordered back to the office after years of remote work, reinstated changes to the civil service system meant to make it easier for him to fire career federal employees, and pardoned or commuted the sentences of the roughly 1,500 people who’d rioted at the Capitol to prevent Biden’s swearing-in just four years earlier.
![[Donald Trump is seen from the vantage point of the press pool during an Oval Office appearance on January 20, 2025]](https://static.independent.co.uk/2025/01/21/17/SEI236755528.jpg)
