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Trump to Become First President in 152 Years to Skip Successor's Inauguration
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January 8, 2021
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1:23Now PlayingPresident Donald Trump said Friday he won’t attend the inauguration of President-elect Joe Biden, after his supporters mounted a violent insurrection at the U.S. Capitol earlier this week.
“To all of those who have asked, I will not be going to the Inauguration on January 20th,” Trump tweeted.
Trump’s decision to skip the event follows the president’s weeks-long effort to overturn the will of voters who elected Biden to replace him. The president and his supporters promoted baseless conspiracies of election fraud, filed scores of futile lawsuits and harangued state officials to halt or reverse certifications of Biden’s victory. The effort culminated in Wednesday’s bloody scene, when a large protest Trump encouraged at the Capitol led to his supporters storming the building, disrupting Congress’s count of Electoral College votes.
Lawmakers and Vice President Mike Pence, who presided over what is normally a pro forma event, were forced to flee.
The violence -- linked to five deaths, including that of a Capitol police officer -- has prompted calls from top lawmakers for the president to be immediately removed from office. Two Cabinet secretaries resigned, citing Trump’s involvement with the insurrection, as well as scores of lower-level administration officials.
As pressure mounted for Trump’s removal from office, the president posted a video Thursday evening in which he conceded Biden would be inaugurated and pledged “a smooth, orderly and seamless transition of power.” The message was widely seen as an effort by the president to stem further staff defections and halt momentum for either his second impeachment or a bid by members of his own Cabinet to invoke the 25th Amendment and remove him from power.
The president reverted back to a more defiant tone on Friday, announcing his plans to skip the inauguration and praising his supporters on Twitter.
Trump’s decision to skip the ceremony is a notable break from recent precedent. The last U.S. president not to attend his successor’s inauguration was Richard Nixon, who resigned due to the Watergate scandal and left Washington, D.C., before Gerald Ford took the oath of office. The last president to miss a regularly scheduled inauguration following an election was Woodrow Wilson, who skipped Warren G. Harding’s 1921 ceremony due to health concerns.
Other presidents have skipped their successors’ inaugurations over political grievance, but not in recent history. John Adams declined to attend the inauguration of Thomas Jefferson after the contested election of 1800. And Andrew Johnson -- who, like Trump, was impeached by the House but escaped conviction by the Senate -- didn’t attend the ceremony for former President Ulysses Grant.
Biden previously said he hoped Trump would attend, telling CNN in an interview that it would be important “to demonstrate the end of this chaos he’s created.”
“The protocol of the transfer of power, I think, is important,” Biden said. “But it is totally his decision, and it’s of no personal consequence to me.”
A White House spokesman declined to comment when asked whether Trump would meet with Biden prior to his inauguration, as is also customary. Former President Barack Obama welcomed Trump to the White House for an Oval Office meeting that included a discussion of pressing foreign policy topics shortly after Trump’s victory in 2016.
Pence’s office hasn’t said whether he’ll attend Biden’s inauguration, though a spokesman for Pence appeared to deny a report in Politico on Thursday saying he planned to be there.
“You can’t attend something you haven’t received an invitation to,” Pence spokesman Devin O’Malley said on Twitter.
A spokeswoman for the congressional inaugural committee told Gray Media Group Inc. that there is not customarily a formal invitation to outgoing presidents and vice presidents, and that the vice president’s office had not informed the committee if Pence planned to attend.
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