The cognitive dissonance of presidential transitions

When presidents meet their successors.

Good morning! It’s Thursday, November 14, 2024. Inauguration Day is 67 days away.

I’ll have more on the Matt Gaetz of it all in the coming days. Plenty of time for that throughout the transition! Today, I want to share some thoughts on Wednesday’s Biden-Trump meeting.

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Take a minute and sit with this photo, captured yesterday by Bloomberg’s Al Drago:

On the wall hangs portraits of America’s longest-serving president. Its first president. The leader many would say was its greatest president. And then, sitting down, is the current president — joined by his predecessor-turned-successor, whose status was confirmed last week as the unquestionably dominant political figure of our era.

The image is all the more striking because it is the second of its kind, the second time Donald Trump has sat in that same spot, meeting with a Democratic president whose handpicked successor he had vanquished, whose legacy he was about to dismantle. Eight years have passed in between, and it is worth considering how much has changed in that time — and how much has stayed the same.

These two photos are part of a long-running collage of presidents meeting with presidents-elect, the most visible confirmation Americans receive of the peaceful transfer of power in the months-long interregnum between an election and inauguration.

Although a new president doesn’t assume office until January 20, “the psychological transfer” takes place when he sits down with his predecessor in the Oval Office, former Vice President Walter Mondale once said. It is a tradition that goes all the way back to the nation’s earliest presidential handoffs.

George Washington hosted John Adams at the president’s residence for social events throughout his term, and continued doing so after the latter was elected to replace him. When Adams was defeated by Thomas Jefferson, he invited him to the White House and “expressed his belief that Jefferson was the rightful winner,” according to Lindsay Chervinsky, the executive director of the George Washington Presidential Library.

Washington did not offer advice to Adams during the transition — in fact, Chervinsky told me, Adams had been hoping for more guidance — but many other presidents have used the transition meeting to make recommendations to their successors. The suggestions are rarely heeded, Chervinsky said: “Usually, incoming presidents think they know better.”

Dwight Eisenhower said in 1952 that his meeting with Harry Truman “added little to my knowledge, nor did it affect my planning for the new administration.” Truman could tell that his advice “went into one ear and out the other,” predicting of the general: “He’ll sit right there and he’ll say, ‘do this, do that!’ And nothing will happen. Poor Ike! It won’t be a bit like the Army. He’ll find it very frustrating.”

Herbert Hoover treated Franklin Roosevelt to an “hour-long lecture on international economic issues,” as the Washington Post put it, and then proposed that “they jointly form a foreign debt commission.” (FDR declined.) Jimmy Carter was annoyed that Ronald Reagan took no notes as they discussed national security, believing — in Mondale’s words — that “it all went over Reagan’s head.” William Howard Taft inquired if his successor, Woodrow Wilson, wanted to take a trip to the Panama Canal together, to which Wilson responded with polite disinterest.

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The chain goes on like that throughout the centuries — with, of course, a missing link: the never-taken photo that should go between the two above. Trump declined to host Joe Biden in the Oval Office in 2020, when he was in the throes of refusing to acknowledge his election loss and still trying to overturn it.

Biden’s Justice Department would later prosecute Trump for those same efforts, just as Trump has threatened to prosecute Biden when he returns to power. In all the years of awkward and contentious transitions, there has never been a meeting between a president who has called the president-elect a “fascist” and a president-elect who has said the president sits atop a “crime family.”

The closest precedent might be Andrew Johnson and Ulysses S. Grant, who were political allies before Grant’s role as a bit player in the events that led to Johnson’s impeachment. Each viewed the other as a liar; when Grant was elected as his successor, Johnson instructed his Cabinet not to the attend the inauguration. “We owed it to ourselves,” one of Johnson’s advisers recalled the president saying, “to take the ground that we could not, with proper self-respect, witness the inauguration of a man whom we knew to be untruthful, faithless and false.”

The next president not to attend their successor’s inauguration was Trump himself. Biden is obviously choosing a different tack, although his own stated belief is that Trump is worse even than “untruthful, faithless and false” — he is, in Biden’s words, a “threat to democracy.”

Of all the photos that were taken yesterday, the shot I found most interesting was this one, which was released by the White House’s own photographer:

Ever the institutionalist, Biden was always going to continue the ritual of sitting down with his successor — but there is no tradition that requires the two to pose for a separate photo together, grinning like the Cheshire Cat.

There is always cognitive dissonance in a presidential transition — as the most powerful man in the world gives up power, often, to someone he despises — but rarely more so than exists in this photo, of Biden mugging for the camera next to someone whose rhetoric he’s likened to Hitler’s.

Perhaps Biden never really believed all that; as Trump himself said in the Oval Office yesterday, politics isn’t always a “nice world.” Or maybe he did believe it, but is pushing that aside for the good of the country — although, again, if he genuinely thought Trump’s ascension would destroy the country, why go the extra step and pose for a smiling photo with him?

Less likely still, maybe the photo is a belated acknowledgement that the “threat to democracy” rhetoric was a failed political project. The left sometimes accuses journalists of “sanewashing” Trump, but there could be no larger act of normalization than the above photo — and, yet, then again, that may represent a smart political play for Democrats. As the Atlantic’s Conor Friedersdorf recently wrote, Trump’s political revival appears to confirm that Democrats have repeatedly overstepped in their resistance to him. Perhaps the wiser move is to treat him as a normal president, and oppose him strictly on those grounds, dropping the hysterics.

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There is one more tradition of presidential transition meetings, and perhaps it’s this that explains the Cheshire Cat photo.

Several of the most recent presidents have used the meeting to ask their successors to save a signature initiative, appealing to their better graces. Carter asked Reagan to stand by his Mideast peace accords. (He did.) Bush I asked Clinton to preserve the Points of Light program; in turn, Clinton asked Bush II to keep AmeriCorps. (Both complied, although not without some controversy.)

According to the the journalist Edward Isaac-Dovere, Barack Obama told aides that he spent their 2016 meeting “buttering Trump up,” urging him to keep the Iran nuclear deal and the Affordable Care Act — although he suggested that the president-elect could rebrand them as the “Trump Anti-Nuclear Deal” and “Trumpcare,” respectively. (Trump did not take either suggestion.)

The Trump-Biden sit-down lasted two hours — long by the standards of these meetings. According to White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre, Trump “came with a detailed set of questions.” Maybe Biden was trying to butter Trump up as well — but what request would he even have made of him? To rescue Ukraine aid?To show mercy on Hunter Biden?

Two hours after he left the White House, Trump announced his intent to nominate Tulsi Gabbard — who has been accused of parroting Russian disinformation about the Ukraine war — as Director of National Intelligence. Thirty minutes later, Trump unveiled his nominee for Attorney General: Florida congressman Matt Gaetz, a clear signal that Trump intends to continue with political prosecutions of his rivals.

Like many past presidents, whatever advice Biden might have given Trump — and no matter how many photos they may have posed for — Biden will likely find his suggestions are about to go unheeded.

In 1797, Adams described his handoff from Washington as a “Sun setting” and “another rising,” calling it “the sublimest Thing ever exhibited in America.” On Wednesday at the White House, things seemed just as smiley. It remains to be seen whether that precedent continues.