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One last time Donald Trump gets the scenario he loves so much: Air Force One, the President's iconic airplane, waiting for him.
American flags in front of it.
Red carpet.
A stage.
Music from the speaker.
Like an election rally.
Joint Base Andrews, Maryland Government Airport, just outside Washington, on Wednesday morning.
The outgoing 45th President says goodbye before his flight to Florida, his adopted home.
He is skipping the inauguration of his successor - as no president has done for 152 years.
For Trump, this undignified farewell must be bitter.
Unlike weeks ago at his legendary rallies, not thousands of people accepted his invitation, just family, a few employees and a few fans.
The most faithful of the faithful.
For the crowd-obsessed Trump, this hardly gives the hoped-for images.
Quite a few employees turned down the invitation.
According to CNN, the invited guests were each allowed to bring five more people with them.
Apparently only a few made use of this right.
One last speech about your own greatness - then Trump disappears
It is even more interesting who is not present.
The outgoing Vice President Mike Pence is missing;
the two men fell apart because Pence duly managed the certification of the presidential election result.
Extremist supporters therefore wanted to "hang up" Pence.
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What is more painful for Trump is that the two leading Republicans in Congress have voted against him.
Kevin McCarthy, Minority Leader in the House of Representatives, and Mitch McConnell, outgoing Senate Majority Leader, prefer to attend a Catholic service this Wednesday morning with President-elect Joe Biden.
This is remarkable, as both men had their backs on the President for almost four years, defending and obscuring the most absurd of his positions.
McCarthy even trimmed his faction to object to the election result, and voted accordingly even after the Capitol storm was over.
But two weeks is half an eternity in American politics.
McCarthy is now raising allegations against Trump.
And McConnell is currently marching straight to support the impeachment case against the 45th US President.
Senate will soon discuss "incitement to riot"
The Senate is likely to discuss the impeachment process for "incitement to riot" soon - even if Trump has left the White House.
McConnell blamed Trump for the attack on the Capitol.
“The mob was fed lies,” he said on Tuesday.
The rioters were "driven by the president and other powerful people".
It is quite possible that Congress will exclude Trump from holding public office in the future.
That would be the end of a way back to the White House, for a presidential candidacy in 2024.
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So while the new President Joe Biden visited the church on Wednesday morning across all parties, Trump only served family and most loyal fans.
At 8:12 a.m., the Trump couple had left the White House;
for the first lady it was the first public appearance this year.
They posed in front of the photographers.
Donald Trump and his wife Melania are leaving the White House
Source: AFP / MANDEL NGAN
The presidency, said Trump, was “an honor for life”, he just wanted to say “goodbye”.
And hopefully it won't be a long farewell.
He ignored reporter questions.
Hand in hand, the couple went to Marine One, the presidential helicopter.
It took off at 8:18 a.m. on its ten-minute flight to Andrews Air Base.
“We love you”, Trump began his speech there, speaking of “an incredible four years”.
You have "achieved a lot".
Trump thanked his family who were present for having "worked hard".
His wife is "popular" as a first lady.
Trump himself left the White House with the lowest approval ratings since polls were conducted.
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"We weren't a normal government," said Trump.
He hopes the new government will "not raise your taxes".
In the election he received 75 million votes (74.2 million; Joe Biden got 81.3 million votes).
He wanted to “listen” in the future, announced Trump - but that would be a completely new character trait.
He wished the new government “luck and success”.
He still did not admit his electoral defeat, he did not congratulate Joe Biden or even mention his name.
He thanked Pence and his wife briefly.
"We will be back - in some form," he announced.
"We'll see each other soon."
It was a Trump-style farewell.
And he remained a bad loser in the election, consistently clinging to his false claims and lies.
Already weeks before the presidential election he had declared that he could only win the election against the "worst candidate of all time" - unless there was fraud involved.
Trump even flirted with a - constitutionally impossible - postponement of the election.
He did not promise a peaceful transition phase in the event of a defeat.
Republicans and diplomats alike put that into perspective, tried to calm things down.
But Trump remained true to himself, attacked party friends who followed the law.
He fantasized about “election fraud,” popular conspiracy theories, while losing lawsuit after lawsuit.
He never accepted his defeat.
He never called Biden, he didn't congratulate him, he didn't invite him to the White House.
One has seldom seen so much contempt for office and democracy, for the unwritten rules of this political system.
In the end, Trump even incited his already obsessed fans, including right-wing extremists and conspiracy theorists.
That culminated in a violent storm on the Capitol two weeks ago.
Perhaps in the end it was a good thing that Trump did not appear again on January 20 in front of the “Temple of American Democracy”.
Trump also designed the last few days in office in his own special style.
Actually, he no longer governed, but concentrated on work on his own behalf.
The farewell visit to the military, thanks to the National Guards who had to guard the Capitol after the violence of the pro-Trump mob - all of this was done by Vice President Pence.
Instead, Trump consulted with devoted followers.
Suddenly Bannon was on the list of pardons
On his last night in office, Wednesday dawned, he pardoned his former chief strategist Steve Bannon and more than 70 other people.
Mostly people with friendship, political, business ties to Trump - or all three.
By Tuesday afternoon, Trump's advisors had believed they could prevent Bannon's pardon.
Around 9 p.m. Trump is said to have changed his mind, reports the New York Times.
He added Bannon, with whom he was in telephone contact, to the list.
Trump pardoned a total of 143 Americans in the last few months, the majority of whom were patrons and companions.
Trump, in his own words, set out to dry up the "swamp" in Washington.
In truth, he created a “swamp” of corruption and contempt for democracy.
Trump rejected the usual procedure for presidential pardons.
His personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani, who was not on the list in the end, was left behind.
Trump had long considered pardoning himself, his three oldest children and son-in-law Jared Kushner.
However, his legal advisor Pat Cipollone and ex-Attorney General William Barr advised him against it because it was tantamount to admission of guilt.
For the same reason, Cipollone warned the president not to pardon Republican Congressmen who could be linked to the storming of the Capitol.