According to reports, the country singer, 41, performed “America the Beautiful” during the Monday, January 20, ceremony at the U.S. Capitol building in Washington, D.C. She was accompanied by the Armed Forces Chorus and the United States Naval Academy Glee Club — but she didn’t have any musical accompaniment.
After a few musical notes played, there was silence. Underwood waited for a few moments for the technical glitch to be fixed before she asked if she should just sing a capella. “If you know the words, help me out here,” she told the audience.
Carrie Underwood sang “America the Beautiful” with help from all of the inauguration attendees. Underwood shook hands with Joe Biden, J.D. Vance and Trump before leaving the stage. She wore a sleeveless light gray dress with a cowl neck and accessorized with a sparkling diamond bracelet and matching earrings.
Other performances at the inauguration included Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the USA” and opera singer Christopher Macchio’s rendition of the national anthem. A Presidential Inaugural Committee spokesperson confirmed Underwood’s involvement with the ceremony on January 13 after a leaked copy of the program was shared via X.”I love our country and am honored to have been asked to sing at the inauguration and to be a small part of this historic event,” she said in a statement. “I am humbled to answer the call at a time when we must all come together in the spirit of unity and looking to the future.”
The tech tycoons, whose companies are among the world’s most valuable, have spent the ten weeks since the election courting favor with Trump, marking a dramatic shift from Silicon Valley’s more hostile response to his first term four years ago.
TikTok on Sunday credited Trump for promising an executive order to save the app from a US ban, though its fate in the United States remains unclear while under Chinese company ByteDance’s ownership, in defiance of a US law.
Despite highly limited seating after the ceremony moved indoors due to bad weather, Meta CEO Zuckerberg attended with his wife Priscilla Chan, while Amazon executive Bezos was accompanied by his fiancée, Lauren Sanchez.
Their prominent positions on the inauguration stage — more visible than many cabinet members — was particularly notable for Zuckerberg, whom Trump had threatened with life imprisonment just months ago.
Zuckerberg recently made headlines by brashly aligning his company’s policies with Trump’s worldview, notably by eliminating fact-checking in the United States and relaxing hate speech restrictions on Facebook and Instagram.
Musk has shown the strongest support for Trump, contributing $277 million to the president’s campaign and transforming his X platform into an amplifier for pro-Trump voices.
Bezos, like Zuckerberg and his peers, has visited Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida leading up to the inauguration, with favorable treatment, government contracts and reduced regulatory scrutiny for Amazon in the balance.
As owner of The Washington Post, Bezos sparked controversy by blocking the newspaper’s planned endorsement of Vice President Kamala Harris for the 2024 presidential election, triggering newsroom protests and subscriber cancellations.
Musk has been appointed to co-lead the Department of Government Efficiency to advise the White House on cutbacks to public spending and has spent much of the past two months at Mar-a-Lago.
While Musk’s SpaceX is already a major government contractor, Amazon’s AWS cloud computing division and Google also count the US government among their biggest clients.
Google, Meta, Apple, and Amazon face landmark antitrust lawsuits from the US government that could force their breakup.
(With agency inputs)
