He was certainly given an orderly transition. Hillary Clinton conceded the election the morning after election day. The day after that Obama had Trump over to the White House:
President Obama met with Trump in the Oval Office for 90 minutes, just two days after Election Day. Obama told Trump he wanted him to succeed and would support him in a smooth transition. Trump, who for years falsely claimed Obama was not American and even accused the president of founding ISIS on the campaign trail, called Obama a “very good man” in their meeting and said he would heed Obama’s counsel.
Biden, then the vice president, spoke with Mike Pence in the VP’s West Wing office the same day Obama and Trump met. Biden and Pence later met on November 16, 2016, spending two hours at the vice president’s residence with their wives, Jill Biden and Karen Pence. Biden joked he’d be available to Pence as “senior staff,” on call 24/7.
Their November 16 meeting was seen as a peace offering between the two men from opposing political parties. “We are just very grateful for the hospitality today for the Vice President and the second lady,” Pence said then.Biden continued to offer Pence advice on foreign policy issues for the first several months of Pence’s tenure, and their last substantive conversation on related matters occurred in the summer of 2017, Biden aides told CNN’s Arlette Saenz in 2019.
The transitions can be vitally important:
As President Trump continues to contest the results of the election, President-elect Joe Biden continues to shape his administration, which will take office on Jan. 20. But there is still no formal transition underway, a far cry from the last several times new presidents have taken power.
In 2009, just before then-President-elect Barack Obama was to deliver his inaugural address, members of the outgoing Bush administration’s national security team sat down with the people who were about to take their place.
Stephen Hadley, who was George W. Bush’s national security adviser, remembers they were set to talk about the threat posed by Iran. He recounted the meeting at a webinar last month sponsored by the nonpartisan Center for Presidential Transition.
“And that weekend we had gotten intelligence that there was a potential threat to the inauguration itself,” he said. “So that Saturday morning, we had the FBI director come in and brief both the existing and incoming national security teams about that projected threat, what we knew about it and what we were doing about it, and then had kind of a roundtable discussion.”
Among those taking part in the discussion was then-Sen. Hillary Clinton, who was set to become Obama’s secretary of state. Hadley says Clinton posed an interesting question.
” ‘Well, what do we tell President Obama if he’s in the middle of his inauguration speech and he hears a loud bang, a potential bomb attack or something like that? What does he do? Does he hunker down? Do we rush him off the stage? How does he want to handle that moment?’ Well, that was a very productive discussion,” Hadley recalled.
Thankfully, there was no bang or attack, and Obama’s inauguration proceeded smoothly.
National security is one of the major reasons smooth transitions are so crucial, says Barbara Perry, director of presidential studies at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center. Perry notes that the 9/11 Commission pointed to the shortened transition period between Bill Clinton’s administration and the Bush administration after the disputed 2000 results in Florida as playing a role in al-Qaida’s attack in 2001.
That, as well as the economic crisis at the end of Bush’s term, is why Perry believes the outgoing Bush administration worked so hard for a successful transition with the Obama White House.
“They were leaving office, and Obama was coming in in the midst of this horrible crisis that almost feels like it pales compared to what we’re facing now,” Perry says. “But remember, at the time it seemed pretty dire because the entire economic system was collapsing around the world and in the United States and was within inches of seizing up.”
The Obama administration tried to emulate the smooth transition between it and the Bush administration after President Trump was elected four years ago. But Obama’s chief of staff, Denis McDonough, says Trump made it difficult.
Trump replaced his transition team just after the election, and McDonough said at the recent webinar, “it appears that a lot of the material that was prepared for the transition team just wasn’t consumed.”
Ok, so the imbecile and his cronies didn’t pay any attention to the transition because they were stupid. That does not mean that getting access to the civil servants and other professionals isn’t important. Trump is just going to refuse all the way along I expect. There will be no real transition. I think that’s perfectly clear.