It was still dark in Washington, DC, at 6:20 am on Friday as Sage Sopko and his friend Jonathan Kingery walked out of the Metro Center rapid transit station wearing red caps emblazoned with "Make America Great Again".

That was the campaign slogan of New York real estate billionaire Donald Trump, who was inaugurated around noon on Friday as the 45th president of the United States.

Sopko and Kingery, both of whom are students at Illinois State University some 1,200 kilometers away, had skipped school for the inauguration.