WASHINGTON (AP) — Earlier than he comes again for good on Inauguration Day, Donald Trump will return to the White Home briefly at the invitation of Democratic President Joe Biden, who had hoped to defeat his Republican predecessor a second time and reside there for 4 extra years.
That will make for an ungainly encounter, particularly on condition that, after Biden ousted Trump in 2020, Trump supplied no such White Home invitation to Biden. Trump even left Washington earlier than the Jan. 20, 2021, inauguration, changing into the primary president to take action since since Andrew Johnson skipped the 1869 swearing-in of Ulysses S. Grant.
Biden additionally has the bizarre distinction of getting overwhelmed Trump in a single cycle and run towards him for about 15 months throughout this yr’s marketing campaign. As he sought reelection, Biden continuously decried Trump as a menace to democracy and the nation’s core values earlier than leaving the race in July and endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris, who took on her personal marketing campaign and misplaced on Election Day.
When the 2 meet within the Oval Workplace on Wednesday, it’ll technically be the primary time since 1992 that an outgoing president sits down with an incoming one he competed towards in a marketing campaign. Again then, Republican President George H.W. Bush met with Democrat and President-elect Invoice Clinton about two weeks after they squared off on Election Day.
Bush and Clinton talked coverage earlier than going collectively to the Roosevelt Room to fulfill with their transition employees. Clinton later referred to as the assembly “terrific” and mentioned Bush was “very helpful.”
AP Picture/Barry Thumma, File
Over the many years, such handoff conferences between outgoing presidents and their replacements have been by turns pleasant, tense and someplace in between.
This time, Biden has vowed to make sure a clean transition and emphasised the significance of working with Trump, who’s each his presidential predecessor and successor, to deliver the nation collectively. Biden’s White Home invitation to Trump contains his spouse, the previous and now incoming first girl, Melania Trump.
“I assured him that I’d direct my entire administration to work with his team,” Biden mentioned of the decision with Trump when he made the invitation. The president-elect “looks forward to the meeting,” spokesman Steven Cheung mentioned.
Jim Bendat, a historian and creator of “Democracy’s Big Day: The Inauguration of Our President,” referred to as face-to-face chats between outgoing and incoming presidents “healthy for democracy.”
“I’m pleased to see that the Democrats have chosen to take the high road and returned to the traditions that really do make America great,” Bendat mentioned.
Trump has accomplished this earlier than
This yr’s assembly gained’t be uncharted territory for Trump.
He and then-Democratic President Barack Obama held a longer-than-scheduled 90-minute Oval Workplace dialogue days after the 2016 election. White Home chief of employees Denis McDonough additionally confirmed Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner across the West Wing.
“We now are going to want to do everything we can to help you succeed. Because, if you succeed, then the country succeeds,” Obama advised Trump, regardless of the president-elect being contemporary off a victory that dented the outgoing president’s legacy.
Trump appeared nervous and was unusually subdued, calling Obama “a good man” and the assembly “a great honor.” He mentioned he had “great respect” for Obama and that they “discussed a lot of different situations, some wonderful and some difficulties.”
“I very much look forward to dealing with the president in the future, including counsel,” Trump mentioned. Obama White Home press secretary Josh Earnest described the assembly as “at least a little less awkward than some might have expected,” and he famous that the 2 “did not relitigate their differences in the Oval Office.”
In actual fact, that encounter went easily sufficient to reassure a number of Trump critics that he would possibly develop into the job and grow to be extra presidential in temperament and motion — an evaluation shortly subsumed by Trump’s distinctive relish of bombast and political battle as soon as his administration started, significantly when it got here to his predecessor.
Solely about 4 months later, Trump accused Obama – with out proof – of getting his “wires tapped” in Trump Tower earlier than the 2016 election. On social media, he blasted the previous president for partaking in “McCarthyism” and decrying it as “Nixon/Watergate. Bad (or sick) guy!”
Obama aides now say that whereas the 2016 Trump-Obama assembly went nicely publicly, the incoming president’s workforce ignored a lot of the transition course of and didn’t have the identical reverence for the White Home and federal establishments that they or Republican President George W. Bush’s workforce had.
One recalled that the one query Trump counterparts requested on the time was not concerning the coming workload or obligations, however how finest to search out an residence in Washington.
A convention, however not a requirement
The official transition course of doesn’t mandate that presidents invite their successors to face-to-face conferences, although it will probably really feel that method.
“The psychological transfer occurs then,” former Vice President Walter Mondale as soon as mentioned.
There’s no file of George Washington scheduling a proper assembly with the nation’s second president, John Adams, earlier than leaving the then-capital metropolis of New York. And Adams, after shifting into the White Home throughout his time period, by no means invited his political rival and successor, Thomas Jefferson, over earlier than leaving with out attending Jefferson’s inauguration in 1801.
Nonetheless, by 1841, President Martin Van Buren hosted President-elect William Henry Harrison — who had soundly overwhelmed him on Election Day — for dinner on the White Home. He even later supplied to depart the official residence early to make room for his successor after Washington’s Nationwide Lodge, the place Harrison had been staying, turned overcrowded. Harrison as a substitute made a short, preinaugural journey to Virginia.
Extra lately, Republican George W. Bush welcomed Obama to the White Home in 2008 after calling the election of the nation’s first Black president a “triumph of the American story.”
And eight years prior, Bush himself was the newcomer when he met with the outgoing Clinton, who had denied his father a second time period. Their chat got here simply eight days after the Supreme Court docket resolved the disputed 2000 election, and Bush additionally later headed to the vice presidential residence to briefly speak with the person he defeated, Al Gore.
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Bush and Gore didn’t say what they mentioned, although vice presidential press aide Jim Kennedy described the dialog as meant to ″show that it is a nation the place we put apart our variations after an extended and tough marketing campaign.″
Trump and Harris spoke by telephone this previous week however don’t have a face-to-face assembly deliberate.
