U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry will not attend the inauguration of the next president of the United States, Donald J. Trump, this Friday, according to an announcement by the State Department.
“The secretary will not attend the inauguration,” a State Department official told the Washington Examiner, the paper said in a report on its website Wednesday afternoon.
There was no information on why Mr. Kerry would not be able to attend.
The Secretary said this week that Mr. Trump had made a faux pas in the world of international diplomacy with remarks criticizing German Chancellor Angela Merkel.
The president-elect said earlier in the week that the Chancellor had made “one very catastrophic mistake” by admitting more than a million migrants into her country. However, he also called Angela Merkel “by far Europe’s most important leader.”
“I thought frankly it was inappropriate for a president-elect of the United States to be stepping into the politics of other countries in a quite direct manner,” Kerry said.
The comment was made just a bare few weeks after a speech in which the Secretary spent nearly an hour ferociously criticizing the policies of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and members of his government.
