Capping 4 years of bucking norms, Trump is the primary US president in additional than 150 years to skip successor’s inauguration.
United States President Donald Trump has left the White Home.
Trump boarded the presidential helicopter Marine One at 8:20am (13:20 GMT) on Wednesday.
He briefly spoke to reporters calling his time period the ‘honour of a lifetime’ and an ‘superb 4 years’ earlier than boarding the helicopter enroute to a farewell ceremony at Joint Base Andrews, earlier than flying to Florida.
The departure comes lower than 4 hours earlier than Joe Biden will change into the nation’s forty sixth president.
Capping off a presidency that prided itself on bucking fashionable political norms, Trump ended his four-year keep at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue with one remaining breach of decorum as he turned the primary president in additional than 150 years to skip his successor’s inauguration.
The actual estate-mogul-turned-businessman-turned-president as a substitute has maintained that November’s election was “rigged” and “stolen” from him – claims that have been discovered to haven’t any foundation in actuality regardless of quite a few court docket challenges, audits and recounts.
Whereas failing to overturn the outcomes, Trump’s defiant marketing campaign of misinformation did go away a mark.
Rioters egged on by the president breached the US Capitol as Congress met to certify Biden’s victory on January 6. 5 folks have been killed within the violence.
In a rare second on Tuesday, Trump’s final full day in workplace, Republican Senate Majority Chief Mitch McConnell explicitly positioned the blame at Trump’s toes, saying the rioters have been “fed lies” and have been “provoked by the president and different highly effective folks”.
As Trump was lifted from Joint Base Andrews, the nation continued to brace for additional violence by “home extremists” that federal authorities warned might goal Washington, DC, and the capitals of all 50 US states.
The storming of the seat of the US legislature this month, the primary time since 1814, might additionally derail Trump’s future political ambitions; as a single-term president, he could be eligible to run for a second time period in 2024.
However lawmakers wish to block Trump from holding any US workplace sooner or later.
Accused of “incitement to rebel” for his incessant makes an attempt to overturn the election outcomes and a fiery rally held earlier than the Capitol breach, Trump on January 14 turned the one president in US historical past to be impeached twice by the Home of Representatives.
A Senate trial within the early days of the Biden administration might see Trump barred from holding federal workplace once more, with McConnell’s phrases indicating some Republicans could also be open to conviction.
Mulling political future
Trump, who had by no means held public workplace beforehand, rose to prominence on conservative media as a proponent of the unfounded and racist “birther motion” that claimed then-President Barack Obama was not a US citizen.
His meteoric rise through the 2016 Republican major reshaped the get together, whereas his marketing campaign launch speech labelling Mexican migrants as “rapists” set the tone for a nationalist and divisive type that has come to outline massive swaths of the get together.
After leaving workplace, Trump has floated the concept of beginning his personal media empire that may rival Fox Information, a community that directly served as a de facto Trump mouthpiece.
Trump, who’s heading to Florida, reportedly to mull his future with a small group of aides, additionally faces a pending investigation by the Manhattan district legal professional trying into “in depth and protracted prison conduct on the Trump Group”, the conglomerate he owns.
The New York state legal professional common can also be investigating doable fraudulent enterprise practices by Trump and his organisation.
Together with an array of lawsuits, Trump can also face a prison investigation from the Fulton County district legal professional in Georgia, who’s mulling a probe into Trump’s try to persuade the state’s prime election official to alter the vote tally.
When Trump’s time period ends at noon, he’ll not be shielded from indictment.