Vice President Mike Pence will skip Donald Trump’s farewell ceremony on Wednesday, as will top Republican congressional leaders, in order for them to spend inauguration day with incoming President Joe Biden.
Pence is attending Biden’s swearing-in ceremony later on Wednesday and aides told The Washington Post that it would be logistically challenging for the vice president to do both events.
The swearing-in will take place at the U.S. Capitol’s West Front while Trump’s farewell is at Joint Base Andrews, about 13 miles away.
The events are three hours apart in timing and, as vice president, Pence has access to a motorcade and helicopter.
There have been reports that organizers are struggling to fill the seats for Trump’s departure ceremony and are offering each invitee the chance to bring five guests of their own.
Several former Trump staffers are declining to be there, including his former chief of staff John Kelly and his former National Security Adviser John Bolton.
Both men were invited despite being top Trump critics in their post-White House lives.
Republican Congressional leaders also will snub Trump’s farewell in order to go to mass with Biden as part of a bipartisan display of unity.
Republicans Mitch McConnell and Kevin McCarthy, along with Democrats Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer, will attend the Catholic service with Biden at St. Matthew’s church in downtown Washington D.C., about 10 blocks from the White House.
But McConnell and McCarthy’s decision to spend the morning with Biden means they will miss Trump’s military-style departure.
Trump is holding the departure ceremony on the morning Biden takes the oath of office, becoming the 46th president.
Trump will be the first president in 150 years not to attend his successor’s swearing-in.
He will be at his Mar-a-Lago residence when Biden becomes president.
White House aides have sent out invitations for Trump’s farewell with guests instructed to arrive between 6am and 7:15am for the 8 am event.
The ceremony may include a color guard and 21-gun salute.
The church service is at 8:45 a.m., Axios reported, meaning it will be impossible for McConnell and McCarthy to attend both events.
The images of the two Republican Congressional leaders with Biden are not likely to help their frosty relationship with Trump.
In the wake of the January 6th MAGA riot on Capitol Hill both men accused Trump of inciting the crowd that stormed the Capitol, left five people dead and a mass of destruction in their wake.
‘The mob was fed lies, they were provoked by the president and other powerful people,’ McConnell said on the Senate floor this morning.
The invitation to congressional leadership is part of Biden’s plan to demonstrate his contrast to Trump from the start of his presidency.
The mass will come shortly after Trump departs the White House for the last time.
The outgoing president has eschewed the traditional trappings that come with a peaceful transfer of power.
He did not host Biden at the White House for coffee after the election and will not greet him at front door ahead of the inauguration ceremony
Trump also announced he would not attend his successor’s swearing-in.
The last president not to do so was President Andrew Johnson in 1869 – who had also been impeached, and left Washington, D.C. in disgrace.
Shortly after Trump announced he wouldn’t be there, Barack and Michelle Obama and Bill and Hillary Clinton announced they would attend.
George W. Bush and wife Laura had already confirmed they would be there.
Jimmy Carter, 96, and wife Roslynn, 93, will not attend, the first inaugural they have missed since 1977, while they attempt to keep safe from COVID.
The presidential couples will join Biden after he takes the oath of office, when he and Jill Biden lay a wreath at the tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Arlington National Cemetery in another show of bipartisan unity that is part of Biden’s inauguration theme of ‘America United.’