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Fox & Friends co-host Steve Doocy cited Donald Trump skipping the 2021 inauguration of his successor Joe Biden on Monday morning to offer up a pre-made excuse for Democrats who are planning to bail on the president’s address to the joint sessions of Congress this week.
At the same time, in a bit of revisionist history, Doocy also suggested that Trump snubbed Biden’s ceremony because of the Covid-19 pandemic raging across the United States at the time.
During Monday’s broadcast of Trump’s favorite morning cable news show, the hosts criticized Democrats who were planning on not showing up for the president’s first major address to Congress since returning to the White House. While some Democratic lawmakers have said they will ditch the speech, others will bring federal workers recently fired due to Elon Musk’s DOGE cuts as their guests.
Listing off names of Democrats “who will be sitting out,” co-host Brian Kilmeade fumed that these members of Congress were setting a “bad tradition” before demanding that they be in attendance.
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“Unless something specifically happened to you from the president – I don’t care what party it is – just show up! It is part of your job,” he groused.
“I’m sure Democrats will say, ‘I remember Donald Trump didn’t go to Joe Biden’s inauguration.’ But, then again, it was during Covid,” Doocy reacted. “Unless Democrats want to make a really good show of it, you need to have all of them, you need to see 200 empty chairs. That would send a message to the American people – look, the Democrats didn’t show up because they are opposed to what the president was going to say. But if it’s just four or five or 10 or 20… nobody will notice.”
Co-hosts Lawrence Jones and Ainsley Earhardt agreed, insisting that the American public just doesn’t care.
While Doocy insinuated that the coronavirus pandemic was a significant factor in Trump’s decision not to attend Biden’s inauguration, even though Trump was holding massive rallies and “superspreader” events during the 2020 campaign, the reality is that the current president announced he would not show up two days after an insurrectionist mob attacked the US Capitol to prevent the certification of Biden’s 2020 electoral victory.
With the outgoing president staring down impeachment charges over his role in inciting the Capitol riots, Biden said Trump’s announcement that he was skipping the January 20 ceremony was “one of the few things he and I have ever agreed on” and that it was a “good thing” Trump was “not showing up.” Former Vice President Mike Pence, who was on the receiving end of death threats during the January 6 attack for refusing to overturn the election results, did attend Biden’s inauguration.
Trump, who was the first president in over 150 years to snub the ceremonial transfer of power, still has not conceded that he lost the 2020 election — even after winning the 2024 presidential election. Biden, despite relentlessly portraying Trump as a threat to democracy who should not be allowed back in office, took part in Trump’s inauguration and welcomed him back into the White House.
