Before he comes back for good on Inauguration Day, Donald Trump will return to the White House briefly at the invitation of Democratic President Joe Biden, who had hoped to defeat his Republican predecessor a second time and reside there for four more years.
That may make for an awkward encounter, especially given that, after Biden ousted Trump in 2020, Trump offered no such White House invitation to Biden. Trump even left Washington before the Jan. 20, 2021, inauguration, becoming the first president to do so since Andrew Johnson skipped the 1869 swearing-in of Ulysses S. Grant.
Biden also has the unusual distinction of having beaten Trump in one cycle and run against him for about 15 months during this year’s campaign. As he sought reelection, Biden constantly decried Trump as a threat to democracy and the nation’s core values before leaving the race in July and endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris, who took on her own campaign and lost on Election Day.
When the two meet in the Oval Office on Wednesday, it’ll technically be the first time since 1992 that an outgoing president sits down with an incoming one he competed against in a campaign. Back then, Republican President George H.W. Bush met with Democrat and President-elect Bill Clinton about two weeks after they squared off on Election Day.
Bush and Clinton talked policy before going together to the Roosevelt Room to meet with their transition staff. Clinton later called the meeting "terrific" and said Bush was "very helpful."
Over the decades, such handoff meetings between outgoing presidents and their replacements have been by turns 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 includes his wife, the former and now incoming first lady, Melania Trump.
"I assured him that I’d direct my entire administration to work with his team," Biden said of the call with Trump when he made 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 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 said.
Trump has done this before
This year's meeting won't be uncharted 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 now are going to want to do everything we can to help you succeed. Because, if you succeed, then the country succeeds," Obama told Trump, despite the president-elect being fresh off a victory that dented the outgoing president’s legacy.
Trump appeared nervous and was unusually subdued, calling Obama "a good man" and the meeting "a great honor." He said 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 said. Obama White House press secretary Josh Earnest described the meeting as "at least a little less awkward than some might have expected," and he noted that the two "did not relitigate their differences in the Oval Office."
In fact, that encounter went smoothly enough to reassure a few Trump critics that he might grow into the job and become more presidential in temperament and action — an assessment quickly subsumed by Trump’s unique relish of bombast and political conflict once his administration began, particularly when it came to his predecessor.
Only about four months later, Trump accused Obama – without evidence – of having his "wires tapped" in Trump Tower before the 2016 election. On social media, he blasted the former president for engaging in "McCarthyism" and decrying it as "Nixon/Watergate. Bad (or sick) guy!"
Obama aides now say that while the 2016 Trump-Obama meeting went well publicly, the incoming president's team ignored most of the transition process and did not have the same reverence for the White House and federal institutions that they or Republican President George W. Bush’s team had.
One recalled that the only question Trump counterparts asked at the time was not about the coming workload or responsibilities, but how best to find an apartment in Washington.
A tradition, but not a requirement
The official transition process does not mandate that presidents invite their successors to face-to-face meetings, though it can feel that way.
"The psychological transfer occurs then," former Vice President Walter Mondale once said.
There's no record of George Washington scheduling a formal meeting with the nation's second president, John Adams, before leaving the then-capital city of New York. And Adams, after moving into the White House during his term, never invited his political rival and successor, Thomas Jefferson, over before leaving without attending Jefferson's inauguration in 1801.
Still, by 1841, President Martin Van Buren hosted President-elect William Henry Harrison — who had soundly beaten him on Election Day — for dinner at the White House. He even later offered to leave the official residence early to make room for his successor after Washington's National Hotel, where Harrison had been staying, became overcrowded. Harrison instead made a brief, preinaugural 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 prior, Bush himself was the newcomer when he met with the outgoing Clinton, who had denied his father a second term. Their chat came just eight days after the Supreme Court resolved the disputed 2000 election, and Bush also later headed to the vice presidential residence to briefly talk with the man he defeated, Al Gore.
Bush and Gore didn't say what they discussed, though vice presidential press aide Jim Kennedy described the conversation as meant to "demonstrate that this is a country where we put aside our differences after a long and difficult campaign."
Trump and Harris spoke by phone this past week but don't have a face-to-face meeting planned.
