Donald Trump will meet with President Joe Biden in the Oval Office this week, according to the White House.
The meeting, in which the two men are expected to discuss the transition of power in January, will be the president-elect’s first return to the White House since 2021 when he left office days after the January 6 Capitol riots and refused to attend Biden’s inauguration.
Trump was invited to the meeting, which is scheduled to take place at 11am on Wednesday, by Biden, according to press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre. More details will be made available in due course, the White House said.
Despite the acrimony of the 2024 presidential race, Biden has promised a “peaceful transfer of power” on January 20 2025 – the date of Trump’s second inauguration.
Biden has said he will attend the ceremony, even though Trump did not return the favor in 2021.
“Campaigns are contests of competing visions,” Biden said on Thursday, following the president-elect’s sweeping victory. “The country chooses one or the other.
“We accept the choice the country made. I've said many times, you can't love your country only when you win. You can't love your neighbor only when you agree, something to hope we can do, no matter who you voted for. You see each other not as adversaries, but as fellow Americans.”
He added: “The people vote and choose their own leaders, and they do it peacefully. And we’re in a democracy — the will of the people always prevails.”
Biden also held a congratulatory call with Trump — his predecessor and now his successor — following his election win and promised that he would “direct [his] entire administration” to work with Trump’s team to pass the baton to the incoming president and his staff.
On January 20th, we will have a peaceful transfer of power in America. pic.twitter.com/nrWhimDsJF
— The White House (@WhiteHouse) November 7, 2024
Post-election meetings such as Wednesday’s are traditional between the outgoing president and the incoming president. However, Trump did not host Biden for such a meeting after his defeat in 2020.
That year, Trump argued that widespread voter fraud — which hadn’t actually occurred — cost him the election, delaying the start of the transition from his outgoing administration to Biden’s incoming one for weeks.
At the time, the Trump-appointed head of the General Services Administration (GSA), Emily Murphy, determined that she had no legal standing to determine a winner in the presidential race because Trump was still challenging the results in court. That held up funding and cooperation for the transition.
It wasn’t until Trump’s efforts to subvert election results had collapsed across key states that Murphy agreed to formally “ ascertain a president-elect” and begin the transition process. Trump eventually posted on social media that his administration would cooperate.
To prevent that kind of hold-up in future transitions, the Presidential Transition Improvement Act of 2022 mandates that the transition process begin five days after the election — even if the winner is still in dispute.
This is designed to avoid long delays and means that “an ‘affirmative ascertainment’ by the GSA is no longer a prerequisite for gaining transition support services,” according to agency guidelines on the new rules.
