WASHINGTON – President-elect Donald Trump is set 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 extend an invitation to his successor. Trump actually left Washington before Biden 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 attend the CNN presidential debate at CNN Studios on June 27, 2024 in Atlanta, Georgia. (Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

It will also be the first time since 1992 that an incumbent president sits down with an incoming president against whom he ran in a campaign.

A tradition

The peaceful transition of power from one president to another does not mandate the sitting president to invite his successor to a face-to-face meeting at the White House before Inauguration Day.

But, it is a tradition of over a century that shows almost a symbolic “passing of the baton”.

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

George Washington did not have an official meeting before John Adams took over New York City, then the capital.

But in 1841, President Van Buren hosted President-elect William Henry Harrison for 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 the American story.”

And eight years ago, Bush himself was the newcomer when he met the outgoing Clinton, who denied his father a second term.

Trump’s second invitation and second term

This isn’t Trump’s first rodeo.

President-elect and then Democrat President Barack Obama had a longer-than-scheduled 90-minute talk in the Oval Office days after the 2016 election.

Trump will be the first former president to return to office since Grover Cleveland won back the White House in 1892. He is also the first person convicted of a felony to be elected president and, at 78, is the most age person elected to office.