President Biden, left, and President-elect Donald Trump, right. Associated Press photos
President Biden and President-elect Donald Trump are scheduled to meet in the Oval Office on Wednesday morning, providing an unusual image of the two men who have expressed disdain for each other but are engaging in a ritual that has taken place during most transitions aside from 2020.
The two are planning to meet at 11 a.m., according to White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre, who said additional details would come later. The two briefly saw each other in New York on the anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, but it will be their first extended face-to-face meeting since the disastrous debate performance that drove Biden out of the race.
For Trump, it is a triumphant return to the office he operated out of for four years, following winning an election resoundingly after casting the Biden administration as a disaster and after making personal attacks on Biden’s age.
For Biden, he is welcoming and legitimizing a man he condemned, a man whose ouster – as he has said repeatedly over the past five years – was the entire reason he ran for president in the first place. In recent months, he has called Trump a fascist and an existential threat to democracy.
In remarks on Thursday from the Rose Garden, Biden made clear he would engage in a peaceful transfer of power, in what marked an implicit contrast with Trump’s actions four years ago. Biden spoke to Trump the day after the election, congratulating him and inviting him to meet at the White House. He also plans to attend the inauguration, something Trump did not do four years ago.
Trump also did not invite Biden to meet four years ago, something that President Barack Obama did in 2016, and falsely claimed that Biden was not fairly elected.
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