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Trump returns to Washington to meet with Biden
President Joe Biden will welcome Donald Trump to the White House on Wednesday for an Oval Office visit that is a traditional part of the peaceful handoff of power — a ritual that Trump himself declined to participate in four years ago. Seth David Radwell, independent political analyst, joined LiveNOW from FOX to discuss.
WASHINGTON - President-elect Donald Trump returned to the White House Wednesday morning after accepting an invitation from President Joe Biden.
The two met with a handshake in the Oval Office, each pledging a smooth transition from Democrat to Republican.
Biden congratulated Trump. Trump said "politics is tough" and not always a nice world "but it is a nice world today."
Reporters were quickly ushered out of the room.
U.S. President Joe Biden shakes hands with US President-elect Donald Trump during a meeting in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, DC, on November 13, 2024. (Photo by SAUL LOEB/AFP via Getty Images)
The meeting had potential to be awkward considering when Trump was defeated by Biden back in 2020, he did not extend an invitation to his successor. Trump even left Washington before Biden’s inauguration, becoming the first president to do so since 1869.
This will also be the first time since 1992 that an outgoing president sits down with an incoming one he competed against in a campaign.
A tradition
The peaceful transition of power from one president to another does not mandate the outgoing president to invite their successor to a face-to-face meeting at the White House before Inauguration Day.
But, it has been a tradition for over a century that shows almost a symbolic "passing of the baton."
"The psychological transfer occurs then," former Vice President Walter Mondale once said.
George Washington didn’t have a formal meeting before John Adams took over the then-capital city of New York.
But in 1841, President Van Buren hosted President-elect William Henry Harrison for a dinner at the White House.
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 prior, Bush himself was the newcomer when he met with the outgoing Clinton, who had denied his father a second term.
Trump’s 2nd invitation and 2nd term
This isn’t Trump’s first rodeo.
The president-elect and then-Democratic President Barack Obama held a longer-than-scheduled 90-minute Oval Office discussion days after the 2016 election.
Trump will be the first former president to return to office since Grover Cleveland regained the White House in the 1892 election. He is also the first person convicted of a felony to be elected president and, at 78, is the oldest person elected to the office.