WASHINGTON – President-elect Donald Trump is set to return to the White House on Wednesday morning after accepting an invitation from President Joe Biden.
The meeting could be potentially 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.
FILE – U.S. President Joe Biden (R) and Republican presidential candidate, former U.S. President Donald Trump participate in the CNN Presidential Debate at the CNN Studios on June 27, 2024, in Atlanta, Georgia. (Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)
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.
Source: politics.einnews.com…
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