Biden and Trump meet at the White House for transition talks

WASHINGTON – President-elect Donald Trump will return to the White House on Wednesday morning after accepting an invitation from President Joe Biden.

The meeting could potentially be awkward as Trump, when defeated by Biden in 2020, did not extend an invitation to his successor. Trump even left Washington before Biden inaugurationbecoming the first president to do so since 1869.

This will also be the first time since 1992 that an outgoing president will sit down with a new president against whom he campaigned.

A tradition

The peaceful transfer of power from one president to another does not mandate the outgoing president to invite his successor to a face-to-face meeting at the White House before Inauguration Day.

But it has been a tradition for more than a century that almost symbolically shows ‘the passing of the baton’.

“The psychological transference then takes place,” former Vice President Walter Mondale once said.

George Washington had no formal meeting before John Adams took over the then capital of New York.

But in 1841, President Van Buren hosted newly elected President William Henry Harrison for 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 earlier, Bush himself was the newcomer when he met the outgoing Clinton, who had denied his father a second term.

Trump’s second invitation and second term

This isn’t Trump’s first rodeo.

The president-elect and Democratic at the time 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 crime to be elected president, and at 78 years old is the oldest person elected to the office.