WASHINGTON — President-elect Donald Trump will meet with his former rival President Biden at the White House on Wednesday, a routine part of the transition process that became fraught in 2020 as Trump tried to overturn the election.
Trump did not extend the same courtesy to Biden in 2020, hampering the transition, as he refused to concede that Biden won that election. Trump’s obstinacy continued for weeks, culminating with Jan. 6, 2021, when Trump urged on an angry mob that stormed the Capitol in an attempt to halt the election certification.
Since Trump won the presidency last week, Biden and his team have made a point of highlighting their cooperation, which they see as a teachable moment in a public civics lesson. Vice President Kamala Harris, who took over as the nominee after Biden withdrew from the election in July, campaigned on the idea that Trump would be a threat to democracy.
“This is part of the process, when we talk about a peaceful transfer of power,” White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters Tuesday. “This is what you’re seeing, kind of the beginning of that — when you see the current president and the president who’s coming in — sitting down in the Oval Office and having a discussion.”
Jean-Pierre did not offer details of the meeting or outline who in Trump’s team planned to attend.
Typically, an incoming president will also bring top-level staff members to learn the inner workings of the White House as well as shorter-term issues that may arise during a new president’s first week. That helps prevent a president from being caught unprepared in the face of an early crisis.
Trump’s transition process has been hampered in part because he has missed deadlines to sign papers that promise to avoid conflicts of interest while in office.
But in other ways, he will come into office more aware than his predecessors of the inner workings because he is the only president aside from Grover Cleveland to win nonconsecutive terms.
After he was elected in 2016, Trump met with then-President Obama in the Oval Office for 90 minutes, an encounter that Obama’s advisors described at the time as less awkward than expected. Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner met with Obama’s chief of staff, Denis McDonough, a sign of the influential role Kushner was to play during Trump’s first term. Kushner is not expected to hold a position in Trump’s next term.
Trump’s failure to sign an ethics pledge has held back some crucial aspects of the transition, including access to agency and national security briefings and documents for his team.
Brian Hughes, a spokesperson for Trump’s transition team, said in a statement that the team’s attorneys “continue to constructively engage with the Biden-Harris Administration lawyers regarding all agreements contemplated by the Presidential Transition Act” — the law governing the transition — and would announce later whether they intend to sign the documents.
Meanwhile, the president-elect has progressed in assembling his advisory team in recent days, selecting a chief of staff, Susie Wiles, along with her deputy, Stephen Miller. Trump is expected to select Florida Sen. Marco Rubio as his secretary of State but has not yet made an announcement.
Most of Trump’s meeting with Biden will be private. But they will allow reporters and photographers in to document the occasion and shout questions, which they may or may not answer.
“What the president is committed to doing is making sure that this transition is effective, efficient,” Jean-Pierre said. “And he’s doing that because it is the norm, yes, but also the right thing to do for the American people.”