President Joe Biden has said he will attend Donald Trump’s inauguration if the Republican nominee defeats Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris in the November election.
“I have good manners,” the 46th president said Tuesday. “Not like him.”
In 2021, Trump angrily refused Biden’s inauguration and instead held a farewell ceremony in Washington, D.C., after being defeated by the Biden-Harris ticket. The 78-year-old Republican candidate still refuses, for the third time in a row, to admit that he lost to Biden by more than 6 million votes.
Biden praised Trump’s decision not to attend the January event, which comes weeks after Trump loyalists attacked the U.S. Capitol in a failed attempt to prevent Congress from certifying his successor’s victory.
“One of the few things he and I agreed on … his absence,” Biden said at his transition team headquarters in Delaware at the time.
Biden called his inauguration a “democracy day” at the bipartisan ceremony attended by former presidents Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama. Earlier in the day, Trump left the nation’s capital for his Florida estate after telling supporters, “We will be back in some form.”
Biden and Trump appeared set to face off in the 2024 election until the president announced last month that he would not seek a second term and threw his support behind Harris. The 59-year-old vice president will formally accept the Democratic nomination at the convention in Chicago next week.
The latest poll released Tuesday shows Harris ahead of Trump in what is shaping up to be a tight race.
