WASHINGTON– Before returning permanently on Inauguration Day, Donald Trump will return briefly to the White House at the invitation of Democratic President Joe Biden, who had hoped to defeat his Republican predecessor a second time and reside there for another four years.
That could make for an awkward meeting, especially since, after Biden ousted Trump in 2020, Trump did not extend such an invitation to Biden through the White House. Trump even left Washington before the January 20, 2021 inauguration, becoming the first president to do so since Andrew Johnson skipped Ulysses S. Grant’s swearing-in in 1869.
Biden also has the unusual distinction of having beaten Trump in a single cycle and running against him for about 15 months during this year’s campaign. As he sought re-election, Biden consistently denounced Trump as a threat to democracy and the nation’s core values before leaving the race in July and supporting Vice President Kamala Harris, who launched her own campaign and lost on election day.
When the two men meet in the Oval Office on Wednesday, it will technically be the first time since 1992 that an outgoing president will sit down with an incoming president against whom he competed in a campaign. At the time, Republican President George HW Bush met with Democrat and President-elect Bill Clinton about two weeks after their Election Day clash.
Bush and Clinton discussed policy before heading together to the Roosevelt Room to meet with their transition team. Clinton later called the meeting “tremendous” and said Bush had been “very helpful.”
Over the decades, these handover meetings between outgoing presidents and their replacements have been by turns friendly, tense and somewhere in between.
This time, Biden pledged to ensure a smooth transition and stressed the importance of working with Trump, who is both his predecessor and successor as president, to bring the country together. Biden’s White House invitation to Trump includes his wife, former and now new first lady, Melania Trump.
“I assured him that I would direct my entire administration to work with his team,” Biden said of the call with Trump when he extended the invitation. The president-elect “looks forward to this meeting,” spokesman Steven Cheung said.
Jim Bendat, historian and author of “Democracy’s Big Day: The Inauguration of Our President,” called face-to-face discussions between outgoing and incoming presidents “healthy for democracy.”
“I’m happy to see that Democrats have chosen to take the high road and return to the traditions that truly make America great,” Bendat said.
This year’s meeting won’t be unfamiliar territory for Trump.
He and then-Democratic President Barack Obama held a longer-than-expected 90-minute discussion in the Oval Office days after the 2016 election. White House chief of staff Denis McDonough also gave Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner a tour of the West Wing.
“We will now want to do everything we can to help you succeed. Because if you succeed, then the country succeeds,” Obama told Trump, even though the president-elect is fresh off a victory that damaged the outgoing president’s legacy.
Trump appeared nervous and unusually calm, calling Obama a “good man” and the meeting a “great honor.” He said he had “great respect” for Obama and that they had “discussed many different situations, some wonderful, some difficult.”
“I really look forward to dealing with the president in the future, including his attorney,” Trump said. Obama’s White House press secretary, Josh Earnest, described the meeting as “at least a little less awkward than some might have expected,” and he noted that the two “did not rekindle their differences in the Oval Office.
In fact, this meeting went well enough to reassure some of Trump’s critics that he could grow in the role and become more presidential in temperament and action – an assessment quickly internalized by the unique taste of Trump for the emphasis and political conflict once his administration began, especially when it happened to his predecessor.
Only about four months later, Trump accused Obama – without evidence – of tapping his “phone lines” in Trump Tower before the 2016 election. On social media, he blasted the former president for his involvement in “McCarthyism” and called it “Nixon/Watergate”. A bad guy (or a sick person)! »
Obama aides now say that while the 2016 Trump-Obama meeting went well publicly, the new president’s team ignored most of the transition process and did not have the same respect for the White House and federal institutions that they or the team of Republican President George W. Bush. had.
One recalled that the only question asked at the time by Trump’s counterparts was not about workload or upcoming responsibilities, but about the best way to find an apartment in Washington.
The formal transition process does not require presidents to invite their successors to face-to-face meetings, although that can happen.
“Psychological transference then occurs,” former Vice President Walter Mondale once said.
There is no record of George Washington scheduling a formal meeting with the nation’s second president, John Adams, before leaving New York, then the capital. And Adams, after moving into the White House during his term, never invited his political rival and successor, Thomas Jefferson, before leaving without attending Jefferson’s inauguration in 1801.
Yet in 1841, President Martin Van Buren hosted President-elect William Henry Harrison – who had soundly defeated him on Election Day – for a dinner at the White House. He later even offered to leave the official residence early to make room for his successor after the National Hotel in Washington, where Harrison had stayed, became overcrowded. Harrison instead took a brief pre-inauguration trip to Virginia.
More recently, Republican George W. Bush welcomed Obama to the White House in 2008 after calling the election of the nation’s first black president “a triumph of American history.”
And eight years before, Bush himself was the newcomer when he met with the incumbent Clinton, who had denied his father a second term. Their conversation took place just eight days after the Supreme Court resolved the disputed 2000 election, and Bush also later visited the vice presidential residence to speak briefly with the man he defeated, Al Gore.
Bush and Gore did not say what they discussed, although Vice President Jim Kennedy’s press secretary described the conversation as intended to “demonstrate that this is a country where we put aside our differences after a long and difficult campaign.
Trump and Harris spoke by phone last week, but no in-person meeting is planned.
