Joe Biden was inaugurated as the 46th President of the United States on January 20, 2021, on the west front of a U.S. Capitol that still bore the scars of the January 6th insurrection two weeks earlier. Twenty-five thousand National Guard troops were deployed throughout Washington, fences topped with razor wire surrounded the Capitol complex, and the National Mall, normally packed with hundreds of thousands of spectators, was closed to the public. Biden was 78 years old, the oldest person ever inaugurated as president. He placed his hand on a 127-year-old, five-inch-thick family Bible, the same one he had used for every Senate swearing-in since 1973. His wife, Jill Biden, held the Bible. Chief Justice John Roberts administered the oath at 11:48 a.m. The inauguration was notable for two historic firsts. Kamala Harris, the daughter of Jamaican and Indian immigrants, became the first woman, first Black person, and first person of South Asian descent to serve as Vice President. Amanda Gorman, at 22, became the youngest inaugural poet in American history, delivering "The Hill We Climb" to a national television audience. The pandemic had stripped the ceremony of its usual pageantry. COVID-19 had killed over 400,000 Americans by Inauguration Day. Attendance was severely limited. Former presidents Obama, Bush, and Clinton were present; Donald Trump was not, the first outgoing president to skip his successor's inauguration since Andrew Johnson in 1869. Biden's inaugural address called for national unity and an end to the "uncivil war" that had polarized the country. He spoke directly to the events of January 6, describing the Capitol as a place where "just two weeks ago, violence sought to shake the Capitol's very foundation." The ceremony's significance lay in what it demonstrated: that the constitutional transfer of power could proceed even when the outgoing president refused to participate and his supporters had attempted to prevent it by force. The oath was administered, the government transferred, and the new president began work the same afternoon, signing seventeen executive orders.