WASHINGTON – President-elect Donald Trump is expected to return to the White House Wednesday morning after accepting an invitation from President Joe Biden.

The meeting could be potentially awkward given that when Trump was defeated by Biden in 2020, he did not invite his successor. Trump even left Washington before Biden left inaugurationbecoming the first president to do so since 1869.

FILE – U.S. President Joe Biden (R) and Republican presidential candidate former U.S. President Donald Trump participate in the CNN presidential debate at CNN Studios June 27, 2024 in Atlanta, Georgia. (Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

It will also be the first time since 1992 that an outgoing president has sat down with an incoming president he was competing against in a campaign.

A tradition

The peaceful transition of power from one president to the next does not require the outgoing president to invite his or her successor to a face-to-face meeting at the White House before Inauguration Day.

But it has been a tradition for more than a century which shows an almost symbolic “passing of the baton”.

“The psychological transference then happens,” former Vice President Walter Mondale once said.

George Washington did not have a formal meeting until John Adams took power in New York, then the capital.

But in 1841, President Van Buren hosted President-elect William Henry Harrison for a dinner at the White House.

More recently, Republican George W. Bush welcomed Obama to the White House in 2008 after calling the election of the nation’s first black president “a triumph of American history.”

And eight years before, Bush himself was the newcomer when he met with the incumbent Clinton, who had denied his father a second term.

Trump’s second invitation and second term

This isn’t Trump’s first rodeo.

The president-elect and then Democrat President Barack Obama held a longer-than-expected 90-minute discussion in the Oval Office days after the 2016 election.

Trump will be the first former president to return to office since Grover Cleveland regained the White House in the 1892 election. He is also the first person convicted of a crime to be elected president and, at 78, the oldest person oldest elected to this position.