Washington: Outgoing US President Joe Biden has invited his successor President-elect Donald Trump for a meeting at the White House on November 13, which would formally begin the presidential transition.
“At President Biden’s invitation, President Biden and President-elect Trump will meet in the Oval Office on Wednesday at 11:00 am,” White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said in a statement.
The meeting between the outgoing president and the incoming one is ceremonial and is seeped into decades old tradition. It is generally held in the Oval Office during which the outgoing president gives the president-elect a briefing about the key agenda of the country.
The announcement comes four days after Trump was projected to win the presidential election, defeating Vice President Kamala Harris.
The Trump transition team did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
In the days following her loss, both Biden and Harris committed to a peaceful transfer of power.
At her concession speech at Howard University in Washington, D.C., on Wednesday, the vice president told supporters, “Earlier today, I spoke with President-elect Trump and congratulated him on his victory. I also told him that we will help him and his team with their transition and that we will engage in a peaceful transfer of power.”
In a separate speech on Thursday, Biden echoed the same sentiment, telling reporters at the White House, “I will do my duty as president: I will fulfill my oath and I will honor the Constitution. On Jan. 20, we’ll have a peaceful transfer of power here in America.”
In 2020, following Trump’s loss to Biden, the previous Trump administration stonewalled the transition between administrations, spending weeks denying that Trump lost and fighting the Biden team’s efforts to begin transition work.
Only in early January, hours after a violent mob of Trump supporters stormed the Capitol seeking to stop Congress from certifying Biden’s victory, did then-President Trump agree to an orderly and peaceful transfer of power.
Trump explicitly did not invite Biden to meet at the White House in 2020, forgoing a custom that Trump participated in with then-President Barack Obama in 2016.
