President-elect Donald Trump has returned to the White House for the first time in almost four years for his transition meeting with President Joe Biden.
The men’s Oval Office meeting is the first presidential transition sit-down since former President Barack Obama invited Trump to the White House in 2016 after his win against then-Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton. Trump did not invite Biden in 2020 amid his challenges to that election before the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.
The White House previewed the meeting this week by repeating that it is important to Biden to sit down with Trump because Biden believes in “norms,” “institutions,” and “order,” despite describing Trump as a threat to democracy and, as recently as last month, Biden aides agreeing with former Trump White House chief of staff John Kelly‘s contention that Trump fits the definition of a fascist.
“The American people deserve this, they deserve a peaceful transfer of power,” White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters on Tuesday. “[White House] Chief of Staff Jeff Zients has been pretty, pretty open and available to the Trump transition team, and will continue to do so. We want this to go well. We want this to be a process that gets the job done. And so it’s certainly, we’re going to do anything that we can.”
Zients has been leading the White House Transition Coordinating Committee with Trump’s transition team, which is headed by former Trump Small Business Administration Administrator Linda McMahon and Cantor Fitzgerald CEO Howard Lutnick, in addition to Vice President-elect J.D. Vance, Donald Trump Jr., and Eric Trump.
Although Biden and Trump have resumed the tradition of meeting, first lady Jill Biden and former first lady Melania Trump have not, with Mrs. Trump declining Dr. Biden’s invitation for tea.
“The Bidens extended congratulations and a joint invite to the Trumps to meet at the White House,” a spokeswoman for the first lady told the Washington Examiner.
Mrs. Trump’s office later confirmed she would not be traveling to Washington, D.C. with her husband on Wednesday, but did not provide reasons why.
Reports circulated last weekend that she had a conflicting book tour event and was also angry with the FBI after they executed a search warrant at the Trumps’s private Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida in 2022 as part of a federal investigation into whether he mishandled classified documents. Mrs. Trump is not expected to move back to D.C. full-time. Instead, she is anticipated to split her time between Florida and New York, where her only son with the former president, Barron, will be attending college.
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After winning last week’s election against Vice President Kamala Harris, Trump quickly named his campaign co-manager Susie Wiles as his White House chief of staff. Then this week Trump appointed Rep. Mike Waltz (R-FL) to be his national security adviser, as well as nominating Fox News host Pete Hegseth to be his secretary of defense, Gov. Kristi Noem (R-SD) to be secretary of homeland security, and former Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe to be CIA director, with rumors that he will send his nomination of Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) to be secretary of state to the Senate. He has not yet announced his candidate for secretary of treasury.
Trump, too, said billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk and millionaire entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, would spearhead a new department called the Department of Government Efficiency, abbreviated to DOGE.
Earlier Wednesday, Trump met on Capitol Hill with House Republicans and backed Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) to lead the House once again.
