Trump adds a bitter little coda by skipping the inauguration

Donald Trump announced on January 8, 2021, that he would not attend Joe Biden’s inauguration, and he managed to turn an already volatile transition into one more act of sour defiance on the way out the door. The decision made him the first outgoing president in more than 150 years to skip the ceremony, a break with tradition so stark that it would have looked petty in almost any other political setting. But this was not an ordinary week, and Trump had spent the previous days doing everything he could to stress, disrupt, and delegitimize the machinery of democratic transfer. He was under intense scrutiny for trying to overturn the election he had lost, even as the nation was still reeling from the violence and chaos that broke out at the Capitol the day before. Against that backdrop, his refusal to show up for Biden’s swearing-in did not read like a neutral scheduling decision or an understandable personal choice. It looked like one more deliberate refusal to accept reality, a final public sulk dressed up as principle. Presidential inaugurations are not just ceremonial pageantry, and the meaning of that ceremony matters more when a country is under strain. The point of an inauguration is not to flatter the winner or humiliate the loser. It is to make a hard political fact visible without making it catastrophic: one administration leaves, another takes over, and the defeated side acknowledges the result even if it hates it. That ritual is part of how a democracy keeps itself from sliding into permanent crisis, because it tells the public that power can change hands without the system breaking apart. Trump’s decision to skip the ceremony chipped at that ritual in a way that was both symbolic and revealing. It suggested that he was unwilling to participate even in the most basic gesture of continuity, the kind of gesture that says the office is bigger than the person holding it. Instead, he once again put his own grievance ahead of the country’s need for a clean handoff, as if the republic were required to orbit his feelings. In a week already defined by institutional strain, his choice carried an ugly significance all its own. The practical effect of the boycott was limited, and no one seriously expected the absence itself to derail the transfer of power. Biden would still be inaugurated, the constitutional clock would still keep moving, and the mechanics of succession would proceed whether Trump liked it or not. That is precisely what made the move so bleakly on-brand: it was less a power play than a message. The message was that even at the end, Trump could not bring himself to offer the smallest gesture of respect to the process he had spent weeks attacking. There was no apparent policy argument behind the decision, no sign that he wanted to lower the temperature, and no visible effort to signal acceptance of the result while reserving his criticism. Instead, the announcement fit neatly into a pattern of grievance that had become increasingly destructive as his term collapsed around him. He had already spent days trying to reverse an election he lost, and the country was still absorbing the shock of the assault on Congress when he decided that attending his successor’s inauguration was too much to ask. That made the choice feel less like a dramatic act of conviction than a petty refusal to lose gracefully. It was not toughness. It was petulance. And it made an already ugly exit feel smaller, meaner, and more self-pitying than it needed to be. By then, criticism of the move had become less a matter of partisan outrage than a straightforward reading of the moment. Trump had spent years training supporters to treat loyalty as something owed upward while treating the obligations of office as optional whenever they conflicted with his ego. His final decision reinforced that habit by turning his own departure into a parting gesture of resentment rather than a basic act of democratic acknowledgment. That mattered because symbols are not trivial when institutions are under pressure; symbols are often how a system shows it is still holding together. Skipping the inauguration was not the most consequential act of Trump’s presidency, and it was not what would define the legal or political aftermath of the election on its own. But it was one of the clearest expressions of who he had been in office: a president who routinely confused personal grievance with public duty, and whose idea of strength often seemed to mean making everyone else sit inside his anger. In that sense, the boycott was not an exception to the Trump era. It was a distillation of it. He preferred one last display of spite to the smallest concession to legitimacy, and that choice fit the larger damage he had done by normalizing contempt, turning loss into performance, and making resentment look like a governing style. The missed ceremony did not stand apart from his presidency. It fit it exactly. It was a bitter little coda, graceless and predictable, from a political career that so often mistook self-importance for strength and petulance for principle.