TheCable

President Donald Trump says he will not attend the inauguration of Joe Biden, his successor.

Trump, who has repeatedly contested his defeat in the recent election, announced this via Twitter on Friday.

Biden will take over from him on January 20, 2021, an event which the outgoing president ought to attend as is often the case.

“To all of those who have asked, I will not be going to the Inauguration on January 20th,” Trump tweeted.

To all of those who have asked, I will not be going to the Inauguration on January 20th.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 8, 2021

The US president also said in an earlier tweet that those who voted for him in the election “will not be disrespected or treated unfairly in any way, shape or form!”

“The 75,000,000 great American Patriots who voted for me, AMERICA FIRST, and MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN, will have a GIANT VOICE long into the future,” he said.

Trump won’t be the first to miss his successor’s inauguration though. He follows in the footsteps of Andrew Johnson and John Adams, both of whom had similar clashes with incoming presidents.

His outburst comes a day after he agreed to hand over to Biden, but not without repeating his claim that the election was rigged, even without any evidence of fraud.

Biden won the November 3 election with 81,283,098 votes after flipping some Republican strongholds, leaving Trump with 74,222,958 votes.

On December 14, the electoral college voted just as the states’ ballot went, handing Biden the 306 votes while Trump got 232 votes.

But despite numerous losses in the courts where he sought to overturn the election outcome without any evidence of fraud, Trump insisted that he defeated Biden with “a landslide”.

He had also claimed the election is the “most fraudulent” in US history and “worse than that of third world countries”.

Even some of his party officials have tackled him over his claims of fraud which election officials across the US said were not true.