President-elect, Donald Trump, is meeting with President Barack Obama at the White House, an historic encounter between two men who have been bitter enemies for years. Trump’s first visit to Washington as the President-elect began around 10:30 a.m. when the plane emblazoned with his last name landed at Reagan National Airport, marking a new beginning for America.
According to CNN, Trump is also
scheduled to meet with House Speaker Paul Ryan and Senate Majority
Leader Mitch McConnell while in town. He is traveling with Vice
President-elect Mike Pence, who will meet Vice President Joe Biden.
The Trump-Obama meeting was unexpected
just days ago. The core of Trump’s campaign was his claim that Obama is
incompetent. Obama, meanwhile, had mocked Trump on the campaign trail.
But in the immediate aftermath of Tuesday’s esults, Trump and Obama have both sought to set politics aside ahead of the transition.
Trump struck a magnanimous tone first,
praising rival Hillary Clinton — who he had said on the campaign trail
he would imprison — during his election night speech. “We owe her a
major debt of gratitude for her service to our country,” Trump said,
complimentin her long history of public service.
He also reached out to those who hadn’t
voted for him. “I pledge to every citizen of our land that I will be
President for all of Americans, and this is so important to me. For
those who have chosen not to support me in the past, of which there were
a few people, I’m reaching out to you for your guidance and your help
so that we can work together and unify our great country,” Trump said.
On Wednesday, Obama also recognized
Trump’s victory, and said he plans to ensure a peaceful transition of
power. “We are now all rooting for his success in uniting and leading
the country,” Obama said. “The peaceful transition of power is one of
the hallmarks of our democracy. And over the next few months, we are
going to show that to the world.”
Throughout Obama’s presidency, Trump
persistently sought to undermine the legitimacy of the nation’s first
African-American presidency by questioning his citizenship and his
Christian faith. “He doesn’t have a birth certificate. He may have one,
but there’s something on that, maybe religion, maybe it says he is a
Muslim,” Trump told Fox News in 2011. “I don’t know. Maybe he doesn’t
want that.”
When Obama — attempting to put a stop to
the falsehood — released his “long-form” birth certificate from Hawaii
in April 2011, Trump continued to claim it was somehow faked.
It took until September 2016 — two
months before a presidential election in which he was already the
Republican Party’s nominee — for Trump to admit the reality that Obama
was, indeed, born in the United States. And when he did so, it was only
in a brief statement with no explanation of why he’d changed his
long-held belief, aside from saying in interviews later that he wanted
to get the question off the table in the heat of the campaign.
Obama has directed his own barbs at
Trump, too. At the 2011 White House Correspondents Dinner, with Trump in
the audience, Obama mocked Trump’s birtherism — joking that “no one is
happier” Obama had released his long form birth certificate. “He can
finally get back to focusing on the issues that matter — like, did we
fake the moon landing? What really happened in Roswell? And where are
Biggie and Tupac?” Obama said of Trump.
He also cast Trump as incompetent and
unhinged on the campaign trail, citing a New York Times report that
Trump’s staff had taken his Twitter account away from him after a 3 a.m.
rant about former Miss Universe Alicia Machado. “They had so little
confidence in his self-control, they said, ‘We are just going to take
away your Twitter.’ Now, if somebody can’t handle a Twitter account,
they can’t handle the nuclear codes,” Obama said at a Sunday rally for
Clinton in Florida.
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