WASHINGTON (AP) — Before returning for good on Inauguration Day, Donald Trump will briefly return to the White House at the invitation of Democratic President Joe Biden, who had hoped to defeat his Republican predecessor a second time and stay there for four more years .
That could make for an awkward meeting, especially considering that after Biden ousted Trump in 2020, Trump did not extend such an invitation from the White House to Biden. 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 defeating Trump in one cycle and running against him for about 15 months during this year’s campaign. As he ran for re-election, Biden persistently labeled Trump a threat to democracy and the country’s core values before abandoning the race in July and endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris, who took on her own campaign and on Election Day lost.
When the two meet in the Oval Office on Wednesday, it will technically be the first time since 1992 that an outgoing president will sit down with a new president he ran against in a campaign. At the time, Republican President George HW Bush met with Democrat and President-elect Bill Clinton about two weeks after they met on Election Day.
Bush and Clinton discussed policy before heading together to the Roosevelt Room to meet with their transition staff. Clinton later called the meeting “great” and said Bush was “very helpful.”
In recent decades, such handover meetings between outgoing presidents and their successors have been alternately friendly, tense and somewhere in between.
This time, Biden has vowed to ensure a smooth transition and emphasized the importance of working with Trump, who is both his presidential predecessor and successor, to bring the country together. Biden’s White House invitation to Trump also included his wife, the former and now incoming 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 the meeting,” spokesman Steven Cheung said.
Jim Bendat, a historian and author of “Democracy’s Big Day: The Inauguration of Our President,” called face-to-face conversations between outgoing and incoming presidents “healthy for democracy.”
“I’m glad to see that Democrats have chosen to take the high road and return to the traditions that truly make America great,” Bendat said.
Trump has done this before
This year’s meeting will not be unfamiliar territory for Trump.
He and then-Democratic President Barack Obama held a longer-than-scheduled 90-minute Oval Office discussion days after the 2016 election. White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough also showed Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner around the West Wing.
“We are now going to do everything we can to help you succeed. Because if you succeed, the country succeeds,” Obama told Trump, even though the newly elected president had just come off a victory that tarnished the outgoing president’s legacy.
Trump appeared nervous and was unusually subdued. He called Obama “a good man” and the meeting “a great honor.” He said he had “great respect” for Obama and that they discussed “many different situations, some wonderful and some difficult.”
“I very much look forward to interacting with the president, including his counsel, in the future,” Trump said. Obama White House press secretary Josh Earnest described the meeting as “at least slightly less awkward than some might have expected,” noting that the two “did not revisit their differences in the Oval Office.”
In fact, that meeting went smoothly enough to reassure some Trump critics that he could grow in the job and become more presidential in temperament and action — an assessment that was quickly undermined by Trump’s unique taste for bombast and political conflicts as soon as his reign began, especially when it came to his predecessor.
Just about four months later, Trump accused Obama – without evidence – of “bugging his wires” in Trump Tower before the 2016 election. On social media, he blasted the former president for engaging in “McCarthyism” and labeled it “Nixon/Watergate.” Bad (or sick) man!”
Obama aides now say that while the 2016 meeting between Trump and Obama went well publicly, the new president’s team ignored most of the transition process and did not have the same deference to the White House and federal institutions that they or it team of Republican President George W. Bush. had.
It was recalled that the only question Trump colleagues asked at the time was not about the upcoming workload or responsibilities, but about how best to find an apartment in Washington.
A tradition, but not a requirement
The official transition process does not require presidents to invite their successors to in-person meetings, even though it may feel that way.
“That’s when the psychological transference takes place,” former Vice President Walter Mondale once said.
There are no records that George Washington scheduled a formal meeting with the nation’s second president, John Adams, before leaving the then-capital of New York. And Adams, after moving to the White House during his term, never invited his political rival and successor, Thomas Jefferson, before leaving without attending Jefferson’s 1801 inauguration.
Yet in 1841, President Martin Van Buren hosted newly elected President William Henry Harrison – who had defeated him convincingly on Election Day – for dinner at the White House. He later even offered to leave the official residence early to make way for his successor after Washington’s National Hotel, where Harrison had been staying, became overcrowded. Harrison instead made a short pre-inaugural 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 the American story.”
And eight years earlier, Bush himself was the newcomer when he met the outgoing Clinton, who had denied his father a second term. Their conversation took place just eight days after the Supreme Court decided the disputed 2000 election, and Bush also later went to the vice presidential residence to talk briefly with the man he defeated, Al Gore.
Bush and Gore did not say what they discussed, although Vice Presidential Press Assistant Jim Kennedy described the conversation as intended to “demonstrate that this is a country where we are putting aside our differences after a long and difficult campaign.”
Trump and Harris spoke by phone last week but have not scheduled an in-person meeting.
