The last act of Donald Trump

In the United States, the act of assumption is not merely of a formal nature, it has a fundamental symbolism for the nation, a show of respect and tolerance for alternation in power. From its beginnings as a young nation, this act was carried out successfully with the presence of the outgoing president, save in some circumstances.

If Trump’s words are then consistent with his actions, the next January 20 would become the seventh president in the history of the United States to be absent from the ceremony.

The first who decided not to be part of the investiture of his successor was the second president of the United States, John Adams, in the year 1801. The previous year he had lost reelection at the hands of his vice president Thomas Jefferson and due to personal disputes between the two, he decided not to attend the event. It should be noted that at that time the position of vice president was occupied by the second candidate with the most votes in the Electoral College.

According to his father’s attitude, he was his son John Quincy Adams, the next to make the same decision, with a factor in common: disagreements with the winner of the elections. In 1828, Adams was defeated by Andrew Jackson and, like his father, was deprived of access to a second presidential term.

The conflicts have their origin in the elections of 1824, when Adams prevailed to Jackson by a narrow margin. Although Jackson had won the popular vote and was the one with the most votes of the Electoral College, as he did not reach the minimum established to win, the decision was made by the House of Representatives, because this was established by the twelfth amendment, assuming winner to Adams. Jackson, furious at the results, maintained that the election had been stolen from him and from that moment the rispidencias between Jackson and Adams were constant until 1828 when Jackson finally became president.

Martin Van Buren He was the third president not to participate in the inauguration of the mandate of President William Harrison in 1841, after losing the electoral contest to the representative of the Whig Party. Days before the inauguration, Van Buren decided to undertake a trip to the state of Virginia and did not appear for the oath.

To find the fourth case we go back to the year 1869 and Ulysses Grant had been elected triumphing over Horatio Seymour in 1868. The outgoing president was Andrew Johnson, a former Tennessee Democratic Party senator who ran into the presidency following the assassination of Republican Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln himself had selected him as his vice-presidential candidate because he was the only senator from a southern state to not resign his Senate seat when the Civil War broke out in 1861. However, after the Republican’s death, Johnson did not continue along the same lines as his successor, vetoing innumerable laws in which they stand out, the Civil Rights Act of 1866, the Bureau of Liberation Act, and the Reconstruction Act. He was also the first president in history to undergo impeachment due to the removal from office of his Secretary of War, Edwin Stanton, without the approval of the Senate, which was a violation of the Tenure of Office Act. He was finally acquitted by just one vote.

The incoming president, Ulysses Grant, had spoken out in favor of Johnson’s impeachment process, which generated great discontent in the Democrat and caused him at the last minute to decide not to participate in the Republican’s inauguration.

The fifth president not to attend was Woodrow Wilson by the Democratic Party in 1921, when Republican President-elect Warren Harding (he had defeated Democrat James Cox in 1920) took office, Wilson was unable to participate due to health problems.

The sixth case is an exception since the party of this president did not lose any election as in the five cases mentioned above. We are talking about Richard Nixon, who in 1974 due to the Watergate case and the impeachment process that was to be confirmed, decided to voluntarily resign from his post and it was his vice president at the time, Gerald Ford, who held the US presidency. Because of the media exposure and the unusualness of the event (Nixon was the only case in history to resign), Nixon was not present at the event.

If we take into account the disruptive events this week in the Capitol, which broke with a historical trend in the United States (since 1814 that the Capitol did not suffer an assault of that style, during the Second Anglo-American War), added This announcement by the president would constitute an even more unexpected end to the presidency of Donald Trump if he decides not to attend an event of such magnitude, joining the list of presidents who decided not to be part of a long and prestigious democratic tradition.

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