These presidents didn't attend inaugurations of their successors

President Trump has said he will not attend President-elect Joe Biden’s inauguration on Jan. 20, joining only a small group of former presidents who skipped their successors’ ceremonies after losing reelection.

The first was John Adams, the nation’s second president, who was also the first to lose a reelection bid. He skipped town before the swearing-in of his longtime rival, Thomas Jefferson. Years later, the two Founding Fathers each died within hours of one another on July 4, 1826.

John Quincy Adams repeated his father’s move and skipped the 1829 inauguration of Andrew Jackson, after a bitter campaign that was a rematch from four years earlier, when Jackson won the most states and received the most electoral votes -- but failed to secure a majority in the Electoral College.

Because none of the four candidates, all in the same party, secured an Electoral College majority in the 1824 election, the House of Representatives decided on a winner. Jackson later labeled the end result as a "corrupt bargain" struck between his rivals, Adams and Henry Clay.

Jackson, a war hero and the first president not to have come from an aristocratic family (unlike the Adamses), went on to host a massive public inauguration ceremony and raucous reception at the White House, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Two terms later, Jackson’s vice president, Martin Van Buren, had succeeded him in the White House. But he lost reelection in 1840 to William Henry Harrison, and skipped that inauguration. Although t... (Read more)

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