US: Trump tweets he is skipping Biden’s inauguration

PRESIDENT Donald Trump said he would not attend his successor’s swearing-in, a day after his top aides cajoled him into releasing a video conceding he would soon be departing office.

“To all of those who have asked, I will not be going to the Inauguration on January 20th,” Trump tweeted, making formal what many had long assumed: that Trump would eschew the traditional step of personally demonstrating the peaceful hand-off of power to President-elect Joe Biden. He’ll be the first outgoing president to skip his replacement’s inauguration in more than 150 years.

It came as Trump faces an uncertain final stretch in office. His top aides delivered a blunt warning to him Thursday as he sat sullenly in the West Wing and watched as his Republican allies, Cabinet secretaries and former senior staffers criticized or denounced him one by one.

His daughter Ivanka Trump, White House counsel Pat Cipollone, chief of staff Mark Meadows and others told Trump there was a real chance he would be removed from office — whether by his own Cabinet or lawmakers — if he did not more forcefully denounce the actions of his supporters who attacked the US Capitol the day before.

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.

The next morning, Trump was back to offering a starkly different message on his Twitter account, which has been restored after the social media firm suspended him.

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.

It puts him even further at odds with Vice President Mike Pence, who has expressed a willingness to attend the ceremony if invited.

Traditionally, the outgoing president welcomes the incoming one to the White House in the morning before riding together in the same vehicle to the Capitol building for the swearing in. Trump himself rode with then-President Barack Obama to his own inauguration four year ago.

In 1869, the last time a still-living president boycotted 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.

Speaking later in the day, Biden said Trump made the right choice and said his decision to forgo attendance at the inauguration was one of the few things they could agree on.

“He’s been an embarrassment to the country,” Biden said during remarks in Wilmington, Delaware.

CNN