WASHINGTON − He’s not moving in just yet, but President-elect Donald Trump returned briefly to the White House on Wednesday.

Trump met for nearly two hours with President Joe Biden in the Oval Office just one week after defeating Vice President Kamala Harris to win a second term as president. The meeting between the outgoing president and his successor was an awkward post-election ritual that took place despite the personal animosity between the two men.

Biden has spent months calling Trump a threat to democracy. Trump has repeatedly called Biden the worst president ever.

But with the election behind them, Biden phoned Trump last week to congratulate him on his win and invite him to Washington – a courtesy that Trump refused to extend to him after Biden defeated him in 2020.

Complicating matters further, Biden had wanted another four years as president but changed his mind after his most recent face-to-face meeting with Trump – on a debate stage in Atlanta in June. The debate went so poorly for Biden that he abandoned his reelection campaign a month later, and Harris stepped in as the Democratic nominee.

Trump also met with lawmakers on Wednesday as they held elections for some of Congress’ pivotal leadership roles.

Keep up with live updates from the USA TODAY Network.

White House: Biden reinforced need to stand with Ukraine

President Joe Biden stressed to President-elect Donald Trump the importance of continuing to stand with Ukraine in its war with Russia, White House National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan said.

During their nearly two-hour meeting, Biden reinforced his belief that a strong and stable Europe is in the U.S.’s interest and will keep the U.S. from getting dragged directly into a future war, Sullivan said.

White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre described the meeting between Biden and Trump as “substantive” and said they exchanged views on national security and domestic policy issues facing the nation and the world. Trump came with a detailed set of questions, she said.

Biden also raised important items on Congress’s to do-list for the lame-duck session, including funding the government and providing the funding that he has requested for disaster relief, Jean-Pierre said. Biden also reiterated his intention to make sure there is an orderly and peaceful transfer of power, she said.

−Michael Collins

Trump, Biden meet for nearly two hours

President-elect Donald Trump and outgoing President Joe Biden met at the White House for nearly two hours Wednesday, signifying a peaceful transfer of power four years after Trump left in protest following his loss to Biden in the 2020 election.

The two men began their Oval Office meeting at 11:07 a.m. ET and ended around 1 p.m. ET.

Trump exited the White House from the South Lawn by motorcade without addressing hundreds of reporters who were waiting outside the West Wing on the opposite side of the building.

Trump was joined by his incoming White House chief of staff, 2024 campaign manager Susie Wiles, while Biden was accompanied by Chief of Staff Jeff Zients, according to the White House.

At least one other Trump aide also appeared to be on hand. Stephen Miller, a top Trump immigration adviser and incoming deputy chief of staff for policy, posted a photo of the White House Rose Garden as the meeting took place.

−Joey Garrison

Jill Biden invited the president-elect and his wife to the White House.

Donald Trump accepted the invitation the same day, saying through his spokesperson that he “looked forward to the meeting.” Melania Trump remained silent.

On Wednesday, she announced she won’t be taking tea with Jill Biden.

“Her husband’s return to the Oval Office to commence the transition process is encouraging, and she wishes him great success,” Melania Trump’s office said in a statement on X.

– Swapna Venugopal Ramaswamy

 

Joe Biden to emphasize ‘peaceful transition’ with Donald Trump meeting

Biden’s message during Wednesday’s meeting with Trump is simple, according to the White House: This is what a peaceful transfer of power looks like.

“He wants to show the American people that the system works, to trust the institutions, to trust that the norms do matter here,” White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said Tuesday. “He is showing by leadership what a peaceful transition looks like.”

The meeting comes four years after Trump refused to concede his 2020 election loss to Biden and instead lobbed wild and baseless conspiracy theories to try to overturn the election. Trump’s efforts culminated with the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol by Trump supporters seeking to stop Congress from counting the electoral votes.

– Joey Garrison

Does Joe Biden still believe Donald Trump is a ‘threat to democracy’?

Biden warned Americans repeatedly this year that Trump is a “threat to democracy” after Trump tried to overturn the results of the 2020 election.

The president will now get the chance to say whether he still believes that’s the case when he meets with Trump late Wednesday morning in the Oval Office.

That question is almost certain to be shouted among reporters who will be in the room briefly before the meeting gets underway.

While Biden was at his beach home in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, over the weekend, he was posed the question and deflected. “I’m going to see him on Wednesday,” Biden said in response.

During a post-election speech last week from the White House Rose Garden, Biden told supporters: “We’re going to be OK, but we need to stay engaged.”

White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre, when asked last week whether Biden still believes Trump is a threat to democracy, said: “What we are trying to do is respect what the American people decided. We’re not trying to create any division here.”

– Joey Garrison

The sudden burst of Trump executions, carried out over six months in 2020-21, was the most intense period of federal judicial killings under any president in more than 120 years.

“We are begging President Biden to save these lives, so that Trump will not have an opportunity for another killing spree – because that’s what it will be,” the Rev Sharon Risher said. She is the daughter of Ethel Lance, one of nine Black worshippers gunned down in 2015 by a white supremacist during a church Bible-study class in Charleston, South Carolina.

Risher, who is chair of the abolitionist group Death Penalty Action, said she was intimately acquainted with the “personal feelings of wanting someone gone from the earth”. But she has come to the view that to execute her mother’s killer, who is one of the 40 people on federal death row, would be wrong, because “you don’t have to kill to prove a point”.

Leading civil rights organizations are also speaking out forcefully. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has prioritized the fate of the 40 condemned men as its top priority in coming weeks, centered around a petition calling on the president to “commute the row”.

“This is the time for Biden to cement his moral legacy, by commuting all federal death sentences,” said Yasmin Cader, a deputy legal director for the ACLU.

Biden’s commutation power is one of the most concrete tools at his for safeguarding his values before he hands over to Trump. He pledged to eliminate the federal death penalty during his 2020 presidential campaign, but has since remained largely silent on the issue.

His attorney general, Merrick Garland, imposed a moratorium on all federal executions in 2021.

“Commuting all death sentences would be the one thing that Biden could do to actually live up to his stated desire to end the federal death penalty,” said Abraham Bonowitz, executive director of Death Penalty Action. “Once a president commutes somebody’s sentence, that cannot be undone.”

The 40 condemned prisoners are all men; the only female federal death row inmate, Lisa Montgomery, was executed in the final week of Trump’s presidency. They are held in the special confinement unit, as the federal death row is known, in Terre Haute, Indiana.

In addition to the Charleston shooter, they include the 2013 Boston marathon bomber, and the man who killed 11 Jewish worshippers in an antisemitic attack at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburg in 2018.

Aside from the most notorious killers, federal death row also holds men whose cases are little known yet whose presence on the unit reveals deep flaws and inequities in the system. The composition of the row is infused with racial bias.

Though Black adults comprise 10% of the US population, they form 38% of the 40 under federal death sentences – and more than half of the total inmates are people of color. Some of those Black men were handed capital sentences by all-white juries.

Of the 13 people executed during Trump’s first term, more than half were Black or Native American. Two had intellectual disabilities, which should have exempted them from death under the US constitution, and two others were suffering such serious mental illness that their lawyers argued they were not legally competent to be executed.

Project 2025, the manifesto for a second Trump term produced by the rightwing Heritage Foundation, proposes that the administration should “obtain finality” for every remaining prisoner on federal death row. Trump has also called for the ultimate punishment to be extended to drug dealers and human traffickers.