"Welcome back," Joe Biden said to Donald Trump in the Oval Office. Behind the two men, a fire burned brightly in the office's fireplace on Wednesday, November 13. The Democratic president complied with custom by courteously receiving his predecessor and successor. He promised him a "smooth transition," in the name of respecting the will of the people. Trump was also in a conciliatory mood after shaking hands with his host. "Politics is tough, and it's, in many cases, not a very nice world. But it is a nice world today. And I appreciate it very much."
Their mere physical proximity made this moment out of the ordinary. Biden was careful to honor the norms of a peaceful transition of power, after accusing Trump of posing an existential danger to US democracy. The billionaire, for his part, pretended to forget that he had refused the same courtesy to Biden, whose victory in 2020 he still doesn't recognize.
"What we want to do is move forward," summed up White House spokesperson Karine Jean-Pierre. According to her, the meeting between the two men behind closed doors lasted nearly two hours. It was "very cordial" and "substantive." The president-elect described the Democrat as "very gracious" towards him, speaking to the New York Post. "We got to know each other again," Trump said. He confirmed that he had asked his host for his views on the situation in Ukraine and the Middle East.
A few hours after this meeting, the new appointments decided by Trump were announced. The president-elect nominated Tulsi Gabbard as director of national intelligence. A former Democrat elected in Hawaii, Gabbard has long been an outspoken critic of regime change promoted by the US abroad, to the point of being far tougher on US hawks than on the world's worst dictators. In 2017, she said she was "skeptical" about the use of chemical weapons by Bashar al-Assad's regime in Syria, spreading Damascus's lies and opposing any Western military operation. That year, she met the Syrian leader in the Syrian capital. She subsequently refused to describe Assad as America's "enemy" or "adversary."
On the very day the Russian army invaded Ukraine in February 2022, Gabbard wrote on X that the Biden administration and NATO could have avoided the war had they responded to Moscow's "legitimate security concerns" by blocking the Alliance's access to Kyiv. The former Democrat joined the Trump team during the campaign, earning his repeated compliments. She is a beloved figure of the isolationist right.
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