Jubilee Post News & Views
Special Desk
President Donald Trump won’t go to attend his successor’s swearing-in. Trump announced this via tweet a day after his top aides cajoled him into releasing a video conceding he would soon be departing office.
Trump tweeted, “To all of those who have asked, I will not be going to the Inauguration on January 20th.
Trump will be the first outgoing president to skip his replacement’s inauguration in more than 150 years.
Traditionally, the outgoing president welcomes an incoming one to the White House in the morning before they ride together in a vehicle together to the Capitol building for the swearing in. Trump himself rode with then-President Barack Obama to his own inauguration four year ago.
Trump did not initially want to issue a video decrying the loyalists whose actions he largely supported — and whom he said he “loved” a day earlier — but he told aides to prepare a speech and then he would decide.
Once he read over the brief script they had prepared, Trump agreed to record it Thursday evening — a relief to the senior staff, though concerns lingered he could backtrack during his final days in office given his actual position has remained unchanged: that he lost the election unfairly.
His announcement he would not attend Biden’s inauguration did not come as a surprise, though Trump had been polling people recently about whether he should go and seemed open, at least to some, to appearing.
In 1869, the last time a still-living president failed to appear at his successor’s swearing-in, incoming President Ulysses S. Grant refused to share a carriage with his predecessor Andrew Johnson. Johnson said he would remain behind at the White House.
Three former American presidents do plan to be in attendance for the inauguration, officials say: Bill Clinton, Obama and George W. Bush have all made plans to be in Washington for the official transfer of power.
