Washington
President Donald Trump on Friday officially announced he will not be attending President-elect Joe Biden’s inauguration on January 20. The US President tweeted the announcement.
The announcement was no surprise; Trump has railed against the results of the election for the last two months, pushing conspiracy theories and misinformation about voter fraud while insisting he’d defeated Biden.
Biden won both the popular vote, with more than 81 million votes cast in his favour, and the Electoral College vote. Congress certified the Electoral College votes early Thursday morning, after the process was initially disrupted by a mob of Trump supporters who breached Capitol security.
Meanwhile, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Thursday hit back at assertions that a mob attack on the Capitol showed the United States to be a “banana republic.”
A number of foreign critics as well as former US president George W. Bush made the analogy after rioters stirred up by President Donald Trump rampaged through a session of Congress that certified his loss to Joe Biden.
“The slander reveals a faulty understanding of banana republics and of democracy in America,” said the top US diplomat, a staunch Trump loyalist, as two other members of the cabinet resigned over Wednesday’s violence.– Agencies
