WASHINGTON — Before returning for good on Inauguration Day, Donald Trump will briefly return to the White House on the invitation of Democratic President Joe Biden, who hoped to defeat his Republican predecessor a second time and reside there for an additional 4 years.
This may make for an ungainly assembly, particularly contemplating that, after Biden ousted Trump in 2020, Trump didn’t provide Biden the same invitation to the White House. Trump even left Washington earlier than the inauguration on January 20, 2021, changing into the primary president to take action since Andrew Johnson missed Ulysses S. Grant’s swearing-in in 1869.
Biden additionally has the bizarre distinction of getting crushed Trump in a single cycle and having been against him for about 15 months throughout this 12 months’s marketing campaign. As he sought reelection, Biden constantly denounced Trump as a risk to democracy and the nation’s core values earlier than dropping out of the race in July and supporting Vice President Kamala Harris, who waged her personal marketing campaign and misplaced on Election Day.
When the 2 meet within the Oval Office on Wednesday, it should technically be the primary time since 1992 that an outgoing president will sit down with an incoming president towards whom he had competed in a marketing campaign. Then, Republican President George HW Bush met with Democrat President-elect Bill Clinton about two weeks after their Election Day confrontation.
Bush and Clinton talked politics earlier than going collectively to the Roosevelt Room to fulfill with transition workers. Clinton later known as the assembly “unbelievable” and stated Bush was “very useful.”
Over the many years, these handover conferences between outgoing presidents and their replacements have been by turns pleasant, tense, and someplace between the 2.
This time, Biden promised to make sure a clean transition and burdened the significance of working with Trump, who’s each his presidential predecessor and successor, to deliver the nation collectively. Biden’s White House invitation to Trump consists of his spouse, former first girl and now incoming Melania Trump.
“I assured him that I might have my total administration working along with his staff,” Biden stated of the decision with Trump when he issued the invitation. The president-elect “seems ahead to the assembly,” spokesman Steven Cheung stated.
Jim Bendat, historian and creator of “Democracy’s Big Day: The Inauguration of Our President,” known as face-to-face conversations between outgoing and incoming presidents “wholesome for democracy.”
“I’m happy to see that Democrats have chosen to take the excessive highway and return to the traditions that actually make America nice,” Bendat stated.
Trump has already accomplished this up to now
This 12 months’s assembly is not going to be uncharted territory for Trump.
He and then-Democratic President Barack Obama held a longer-than-expected 90-minute Oval Office discussion days after the 2016 election. White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough additionally confirmed Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner the West Wing.
“Now we need to do every little thing we are able to that can assist you succeed. Because if you happen to succeed, then the nation will succeed,” Obama instructed Trump, regardless that the president-elect had simply arrived a victory that dented the outgoing president’s legacy.
Trump appeared nervous and was unusually calm, calling Obama “a superb man” and the assembly “an excellent honor.” He stated he had “nice respect” for Obama and that “they mentioned many various conditions, some fantastic and a few tough.”
“I stay up for coping with the president sooner or later, together with his lawyer,” Trump stated. Obama White House press secretary Josh Earnest described the assembly as “not less than rather less awkward than some may need anticipated,” and famous that the 2 “didn’t rethink their variations within the Oval Office.” .
Indeed, that assembly went properly sufficient to reassure some Trump critics that he would possibly develop within the job and turn out to be extra presidential in temperament and motion — an evaluation rapidly subsumed by Trump’s distinctive style for bombast and political battle as soon as his administration started, significantly when it got here to his predecessor.
Just about 4 months later, Trump accused Obama – without evidence – of having his “wires tapped” in Trump Tower earlier than the 2016 election. On social media, he criticized the previous president for partaking in “McCarthyism” and denouncing it as “Nixon/Watergate.” Bad (or sick) boy!”
Obama aides now say that though the 2016 Trump-Obama assembly went properly publicly, the incoming president’s staff ignored a lot of the transition process and they didn’t have the identical respect for the White House and federal establishments that they or Republican President George W. Bush’s staff had.
One recalled that the one query Trump’s colleagues requested on the time was not about workload or upcoming tasks, however about the easiest way to search out an condo in Washington.
A convention, however not an obligation
The official transition course of doesn’t require presidents to ask their successors to face-to-face conferences, regardless that it might appear that method.
“Then the psychological switch happens,” former Vice President Walter Mondale as soon as stated.
There is not any report that George Washington scheduled a proper assembly with the nation’s second president, John Adams, earlier than leaving the then-capital of New York. And Adams, after transferring into the White House throughout his time period, by no means invited his political rival and successor, Thomas Jefferson, earlier than leaving with out attending Jefferson’s inauguration in 1801.
However, in 1841, President Martin Van Buren hosted President-elect William Henry Harrison – who had soundly crushed him on Election Day – for a dinner on the White House. He additionally later provided to depart the official residence early to make room for his successor after the National Hotel in Washington, the place Harrison had been staying, grew to become overcrowded. Harrison as a substitute took a short preinaugural journey to Virginia.
More just lately, in 2008, Republican George W. Bush welcomed Obama to the White House after calling the election of the nation’s first black president a “triumph of American historical past.”
And eight years earlier, Bush himself had been the newcomer when he met outgoing President Clinton, who had denied his father a second time period. Their chat got here simply eight days after the Supreme Court settled the disputed 2000 election, and Bush then went to the vice presidential residence to talk briefly with the person he defeated, Al Gore.
Bush and Gore didn’t say what they mentioned, though Vice President Jim Kennedy’s press aide described the dialog as supposed to “present that it is a nation the place we put our variations apart after an extended and tough marketing campaign.” .
Trump and Harris spoke by cellphone final week however haven’t scheduled a face-to-face assembly.
