Biden and Trump Prepare for the Most Cringe Meeting in Politics

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As far as scripted set pieces of American politics go, the first photo-op in the hand-off of power between one White House and the next is up there.

There are moments of cringe, as was the case in 1980 when Ronald Reagan peppered Jimmy Carter with seemingly ancillary questions to the job they were trading, even as the incumbent rightly suspected someone in Reagan’s camp had worked to extend the Iranian hostage crisis so it would end as soon as Reagan took power. During the 1992 iteration that saw George H.W. Bush welcome Bill Clinton to his future office and home after a particularly rowdy race, the incumbent’s staff grew persnickety when incoming spokesman Dee Dee Myers spoke to reporters in the walkway between the office complex and the residence: “We don’t do press conferences in the Colonnade,” a Bush aide sniped. And then eight years later, an attempt at an amiable transition was infamously marred when Clinton’s team took the Ws off government keyboards being passed to the incoming George W. Bush administration—at a cost of almost $5,000 in damages.

But none of those moments was as norm-breakingly flagrant as four years ago when Donald Trump simply refused to invite his successor, Joe Biden, to the White House. The typical niceties mask the inevitable first steps toward accepting that the incumbent party’s window in power is racing to a close and it is time to concede the race—something that Trump never did. Biden, who had spent eight years as Vice President and knew his way around the West Wing well enough, didn’t exactly need a tour from Trump, but a briefing on the ongoing Covid-19 situation and the covert efforts to keep Russia to heel, China at bay, and the Korean Peninsula relatively stable would have been welcome. It was similar silence on Inauguration Day 2021, when the Trumps fled Washington and became the first absentee outgoing First Family since Andrew Johnson skipped Ulysses S. Grant’s 1869 swearing-in ceremony. 

So against this backdrop, Trump will head back to the White House Wednesday as a returning victor, once again forcing polar opposites to sit and debrief in the name of national stability.

Biden phoned Trump right after Election Day and invited him for a meeting that was never offered to Biden. The outgoing President, who is the only politician to defeat Trump in a campaign, has hardly hidden his contempt of his predecessor and soon-to-be successor, but friends say he’s also an institutionalist who is determined not to have Sore Loser on his epitaph.

What’s unknown to this point: Will Kamala Harris join for any of that awkward session? She, too, phoned Trump and congratulated him on his win last Wednesday. Jennifer O’Malley Dillon, Harris’ top aide, vowed Harris “would work with President Biden to ensure a peaceful transfer of power, unlike what we saw in 2020.” 

The last time a sitting Vice President lost out on a promotion was the 2000 election, and then-VP Al Gore joined the Clinton-Bush 43 conversation. By all contemporary accounts, it was unpleasant for both parties’ reps wandering the West Wing.

Harris aides did not respond to questions about Harris’ plans for Wednesday. 

To be sure, transitions are usually fairly routine affairs, especially once the balloting ends. Generally speaking, folks at this level of the game can wall-off the conflicts. During their last weekend at the presidential retreat of Camp David, the elder Bushes invited Clinton’s transition chiefs Warren Christopher and Vernon Jordan to join them in the Maryland mountains. The younger Bush insisted that his team cooperate with the incoming Obama staffers. And, through sneers and tears, Obama’s aides followed the boss’ orders, too. After all, switching out party labels is, actually, the norm.

Only twice in the last century has a party held the White House into another presidency without a mid-term death of an incumbent, and those winners are Herbert Hoover, who followed Calvin Coolidge, and George H.W. Bush, who followed Ronald Reagan. The rest were the likes of Harry Truman (elected in his own right after FDR’s death) and Lyndon Baines Johnson (elected, too, following JFK’s assassination). Basically, for the last hundred years, the White House tends to switch parties when it switches Presidents—requiring the most awkward of meetings between the newcomer and the man he likely spent the last months viciously savaging as a failed incumbent.

But, for the most part, the outgoing and the incoming tend to play nice for the cameras and often find themselves discussing serious matters outside the glare of political gamesmanship. Trump himself has said his 90-minute session with Obama in 2016 was incredibly enlightening and helped him understand the fuller map beyond campaign rhetoric—especially putting into plain language that North Korea was the biggest under-appreciated threat to the incoming administration. (Obama also told Trump not to hire Mike Flynn, whom Obama dismissed from a top intelligence gig; Trump did not heed that but did can Flynn as National Security Adviser after just 22 days.)

Most Presidents with an eye toward history understand the needs of this final act, both for responsible governing and for their personal legacies. Most modern presidencies don’t hit this final stride exactly riding a wave. Truman set the low bar at 32% job approval when he left office. (Nixon would be lower, at 24%, but his resignation in the wake of Watergate has to be treated with a bold-faced asterisk.) Lyndon Johnson, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, and George H.W. Bush all were given the boot by the electorate given a choice. Reagan was far from atop his game by the end, Clinton had emerged a survivor—albeit a bruised one benched by Gore—yet still left office with a 66% job approval rating. George W. Bush spent the 2008 GOP convention touring Africa, far away from delegates and parked at a Trumanesque 34% job approval. Trump raged his way out of office, refusing to accept he had, in fact, lost to Biden. And Biden is currently parked at 41% in Gallup’s decades-long tracking of that office.

All of which is to say this: by this point in their presidencies, the men who run the White House are generally eager to start the legacy-building projects in earnest. Most often than not, they hate their successors. But a photograph—even a group one, as happened with Obama’s transition, for the first such confab in 27 years—goes a long way toward showing unity, normalcy, and even legitimacy.

As much as Biden is going to grit his teeth through Wednesday’s session, he knows the alternative is not an option. While Trump availed himself of that easier route in 2020’s defeat, that’s not how Biden sees the job. And at a time when he’s drawing a fair share of blame for Trump’s return, Biden understands that the best thing for his legacy, and the country, is handling this uncomfortable moment with the composure and grace that the man he is preparing to greet never offered to him. 

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