When former President Donald J. Trump promised to place an finish to “American carnage” in his inauguration speech on Jan. 20, 2017, former Preside
When former President Donald J. Trump promised to place an finish to “American carnage” in his inauguration speech on Jan. 20, 2017, former President Barack Obama regarded on from a seat simply past Mr. Trump’s left shoulder.
President Biden, who attended that inauguration as the previous vp 4 years in the past, took his personal oath of workplace on Wednesday. However Mr. Trump was absent. And whereas that call was a break from the norm, it’s not with out precedent: A handful of American presidents have additionally missed the inaugurations of their successors.
“It’s normally an indication that American society is within the midst of main political feud,” the presidential historian Douglas Brinkley mentioned. “The truth that the incoming and outgoing presidents can’t shake fingers and co-participate in an inauguration implies that one thing’s off-kilter within the democracy.”
That was the case for John Adams, his son John Quincy Adams and Andrew Johnson — three presidents who had been bitterly at odds with those that unseated them. All three males served no multiple time period. And Johnson, like Mr. Trump, was impeached.
When the presidency of John Adams led to 1801, it might have gone badly. The US was in its infancy and had by no means seen a head of state switch energy to a political opponent — on this case, Thomas Jefferson, whose republican imaginative and prescient for the nation was at odds with the robust central authorities favored by Adams.
The election of 1800 was onerous fought, marred by private assaults and deadlocked for weeks. Democracy appeared so wobbly in the course of the voting course of that civil conflict was a definite risk. However ultimately, Jefferson claimed the presidency peacefully. And on Inauguration Day, Adams left Washington quietly, earlier than daybreak, in a stagecoach sure for Baltimore.
John Quincy Adams, the sixth American president, adopted in his father’s footsteps when he declined to attend the swearing-in of the person who had unseated him: the populist Andrew Jackson.