Trump to fulfill with Biden on the White House this week
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Joe Biden will meet with Donald Trump 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.
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.
Despite the acrimony of the 2024 presidential race, Biden has promised a “peaceful transfer of power” on January 20th – the date of Trump’s second inauguration. Biden has said he will attend the ceremony, though Trump did not return the favor in 2021.
“Campaigns are contests of competing visions,” Biden said onTuesday, 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 — 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.
Postelection 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.
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 holdup 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.
That 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.
Source: independent.co.uk
