WASHINGTON — Three years, nine months and 22 days after leaving the White House in disgrace following his failed coup attempt, Donald Trump made his triumphant return on Wednesday.
“Welcome back,” President Joe Biden told the former and soon-be-be president at the start of a nearly two-hour meeting in the Oval Office.
“Politics is tough. And it’s, many cases, not a very nice world, but it is a nice world today. And I appreciate it very much ― a transition that’s so smooth it’ll be as smooth as it can get,” said Trump, who made history last week by becoming the first convicted felon to win the presidency.
The White House session was a marked contrast from four years earlier, when Trump refused to concede his election loss to Biden and never invited him to the White House in what had been a tradition for sitting presidents preparing to leave office. Instead, starting in the wee hours of election night, Trump began lying that a second term had been stolen from him through massive voter fraud.
He continued with these claims even after the Electoral College voted on Dec. 14, 2020. Although Trump finally relented and authorized his executive branch employees to coordinate with Biden’s incoming staff, Trump continued plotting to overturn the election he had lost by 7 million votes.
He engineered the delivery of fraudulent pro-Trump elector slates from key states to enable his vice president, Mike Pence, to cite fraud and declare Trump the winner when he presided over the Jan. 6, 2021, congressional certification of the election. To pressure Pence and Congress into going along, Trump assembled a mob of his supporters on that date and urged them to march on the Capitol to demand Pence do as Trump had commanded.
Pence refused to take part, though, and the resulting violence that Trump incited injured 140 police officers and led to the deaths of five.
Photo by Andrew Harnik/Getty Images
Trump had originally planned to take Air Force One to Scotland and ensconce himself at one of his golf courses there by the time Biden took the oath of office.
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That plan was thwarted, though, when the first minister of Scotland informed him that because of the ongoing COVID pandemic, he would not be welcome there.
Trump instead left the White House the morning of the inauguration, 12 days after announcing he would not be attending. Marine 1 took him to Joint Base Andrews in suburban Maryland, where he delivered a farewell speech to his supporters and then flew aboard Air Force 1 to West Palm Beach, Florida. He was in his compound at his country club across the Intracoastal Waterway a half hour ahead of Biden’s swearing-in on Jan. 20, 2021.
Prior to his meeting with Biden on Wednesday, Trump visited the Republican members of the House at a nearby hotel. There, he told them: “I suspect I won’t be running again unless you say he’s so good we’ve got to figure something else out.”
The House, by itself, would not be able to let Trump run for and serve a third term. Changing the 22nd Amendment to the Constitution would require a two-thirds vote of both the House and the Senate, and then need ratification by three-fourths of the 50 state legislatures.