Former President Donald Trump left office on Tuesday morning with a farewell address at Andrews Air Force Base, The Washington Post reports.
“This is a great, great country. It is my greatest honor and privilege to have been your president,” he told a small audience of former aides and supporters after skipping President Joe Biden’s inauguration.
“I will always fight for you,” Trump said. “I will be watching. I will be listening. And I will tell you that the future of this country has never been better. I wish the new administration great luck and great success. I think they’ll have great success. They have the foundation to do something really spectacular.”
“We will be back in some form,” he added, “Have a good life.”
Many absent:
Former Vice President Mike Pence, Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell, and House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy were all notably absent from Trump’s farewell, though they all attended Biden’s inauguration.
The farewell speech drew former advisers Mark Meadows, Stephen Miller, Ronny Jackson, Sean Spicer and his family.
First Lady Melania Trump said the last four years were the “honor of a lifetime.”
Biden sworn in:
“This is America’s day,” Biden said in his Inaugural Address. “This is democracy’s day.”
“Few people in our nation’s history have been more challenged or found a time more challenging or difficult than the time we’re in now,” he said. “To overcome these challenges, to restore the soul and secure the future of America, requires so much more than words and requires the most elusive of all things in a democracy: unity.”
“Politics doesn’t have to be a raging fire, destroying everything in its path,” he added. “Every disagreement doesn’t have to be a cause for total war. And we must reject the culture in which facts themselves are manipulated and even manufactured.”
