The meeting in the Oval Office and the transfer that both sides wanted to show

The Oval Office received its two presidents on November 13, and the meeting was the transfer’s first act conducted in public. The president-elect, arriving for the first time since the election, was welcomed by the outgoing president with the words that the occasion has always carried, a greeting that the television cameras captured and the country read as the ceremony’s opening line. The two men spoke for nearly two hours in front of the fireplace, the aides withdrew, the notes were taken, and the meeting closed with the standard photograph and the standard statements: the outgoing president pledged a smooth and orderly transition, the president-elect thanked him, and both men described the conversation as substantive.

The meeting’s real content was its restoration of form. Four years earlier, the same transition had been conducted in the president-elect’s absence, the outgoing president having declined to host the incoming one, and the break had been the visible seam in the country’s politics; this time the protocol was kept, the invitation was issued, the visit was made, and the exchange of courtesies was conducted in the room that the constitution’s designers never mentioned but every president has used. The normalcy was the news.

The substance of the two hours, to the extent that either side disclosed it, was the ordinary agenda of the transfer: the war in Ukraine and the American support that the incoming administration will have to decide about, the conflict in the Middle East and the ceasefire diplomacy under way, the domestic agenda that the outgoing president asked the incoming one to consider, and the mechanics of the handover itself, the briefings, the clearances, the files. The outgoing administration has pledged its cooperation, and the cooperation is the part of the transition that the public rarely sees and the government depends on.

The meeting took place against the backdrop of the completed political arithmetic. The week had brought the confirmation that the Republicans would control both houses of the next Congress, and the confirmation had removed the last uncertainty about the shape of the coming government; the meeting in the Oval Office was, in that light, the ceremonial completion of the election’s work, the transfer proceeding on schedule and by the book.

The country that watched the meeting watched it with the knowledge of how easily the formality could have been skipped, and the watching was itself a comment on the state of the institutions. The transfer of power in the United States has always depended on the willingness of the losers to concede and the winners to accept, and the willingness, this year, was demonstrated in the room with the fireplace; the demonstration was the point, and the point was not lost on the cameras.

The meeting in the Oval Office lasted two hours, and the two hours were the transfer’s public proof that the machinery still runs. The greeting was given, the conversation was held, and the country’s oldest political ritual was performed in front of the press; the institutions held their forms, the transfer is under way, and the meeting, for all its ceremony, was the work of the constitution doing what it was designed to do.