Trump says in inaugural address he’ll avoid foreign military entanglements
The newly inaugurated president also celebrated the hostage deal, which drew bipartisan applause

ANDREW HARNIK/POOL/AFP via Getty Images
President Donald Trump at his inaugural address after being sworn in as the 47th president of the United States in the Rotunda of the U.S. Capitol on January 20, 2025 in Washington, DC.
In his second inaugural address, President Donald Trump emphasized his desire to pull back from and avoid foreign military engagements, leaning into his isolationist foreign policy instincts.
“We will again build the strongest military the world has ever seen. We will measure our success not only by the battles we win, but also by the wars that we end, and perhaps most importantly, the wars we never get into,” Trump said.
He said that his “proudest legacy will be that of a peacemaker and unifier.”
Near the beginning of his speech, Trump lamented that the government “has given unlimited funding to the defense of foreign borders, but refuses to defend American borders,” a talking point that some conservatives have used in recent years to oppose funding for Ukraine and, in the case of a smaller number of lawmakers, Israel.
At the same time, the newly inaugurated 47th president emphasized that he would seek to ensure that the U.S. would be “respected again all over the world,” and that he has “no higher responsibility than to defend our country from threats and invasions, and that is exactly what I am going to do. We will do it at a level that nobody has ever seen before.”
Trump also said he was “pleased to say that as of yesterday … the hostages in the Middle East are coming back home to their families,” a line that garnered a bipartisan standing ovation and was the first time former President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris clapped during Trump’s speech, according to a reporter in the rotunda.
Some Iran hawks argued that Trump’s comments about avoiding foreign wars didn’t necessarily rule out him supporting or carrying out a strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities.
Mark Dubowitz, the CEO of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, told Jewish Insider that “support for Israel to strike Iran’s expanding nuclear weapons program would be consistent with his position of no foreign wars for America.”
“The question: Will the president provide everything Israel needs to succeed, including massive ordnance penetrators to destroy Iran’s deeply buried infrastructure and lend Israel the strategic bombers to fly and drop them?” Dubowitz continued. “Or will he fall for an Iran rope-a-dope which yields a deal that doesn’t completely defang Tehran’s nuclear weapons program and merely kicks the nuclear can down the road?”
Jason Brodsky, the policy director for United Against Nuclear Iran, said a strike would be ”very much consistent with the president’s philosophy of peace through strength.”
“The best way to avoid wars is to deter U.S. adversaries. Israel has demonstrated in its two strikes on Iranian soil over the last year that it is possible to launch targeted airstrikes against the Iranian system without triggering a large-scale war,” Brodsky said. “This has overturned flawed assumptions that have guided American thinking on Iran for decades — that if you hit Iranian soil, it automatically results in a war akin to the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003. But that’s incorrect.”
“In fact, Israel’s operation against Iran in October later pushed Hezbollah into a ceasefire. So I do not see this statement necessarily incompatible with developing a credible military threat against Iran,” he continued.
Trump additionally inveighed against the American education system in his speech, which he said “teaches our children to be ashamed of themselves and, in many cases, to hate our country … All of this will change starting today, and it will change very quickly.”
He added, in a reference to Diversity, Equity and Inclusion programs, that he would “end the government policy of trying to socially engineer race and gender into every aspect of public and private life. We will build a society that is colorblind and merit-based.”
The speech provided few hints or specific details about how the new president plans to address issues like Iran or the broader conflict in the Middle East.
Joining current and former lawmakers, former presidents, Supreme Court justices and Trump Cabinet nominees, VIPs who scored some of the limited number of tickets inside the Capitol Rotunda for Trump’s swearing-in included Dr. Miriam Adelson, owner of Las Vegas Sands and a major pro-Israel conservative donor; Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg; Israeli American businessman Ike Perlmutter; Tesla CEO Elon Musk; Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos; hedge fund manager John Paulson; Ultimate Fighting Championship CEO Dana White; LVMH CEO Bernard Arnault; former News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch; Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai; Apple CEO Tim Cook; former Alphabet President Sergey Brin and TikTok CEO Shou Chew.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman was in the overflow crowd in the Capitol Visitor’s Center, alongside New York Mayor Eric Adams, among others.