Trump meets with Obama at the White House as whirlwind transition starts

© Pablo Martinez Monsivais/AP President Barack Obama shakes hands with President-elect Donald Trump in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, Thursday, Nov. 10, 2016. Obama had denounced Trump as “temperamentally unfit” for the White House during a long and brutal campaign. But he said that “we are now all rooting for his success in uniting and leading the country. 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.”

Trump, and Clinton, already had been receiving national-security briefings as the nominees of the two major political parties. The White House said Thursday that Obama has convened a coordinating council to facilitate a smooth transition, including providing briefings from federal agencies to Trump's transition team, headed by New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R).

Officials from the Trump transition team are starting to set up shop in agencies across the federal government, where they can consult with top Obama officials as they assemble their staffs. The current White House has already begun to transfer a massive amount of information to the National Archives and Records Administration: so far it has sent 283 million files, comprising 122,000 gigabytes of data.

In an interview Wednesday, White House communications director Jennifer Psaki said the president has talked privately with his staff, as well as publicly, about putting institutional interests ahead of political ones.

Referring to the speeches Obama delivered upon winning the presidency and at his first inaugural, she said: “He reflects a lot about the cog in the wheel that you are as president. He was taking the baton, he’s handing it off. But I think it’s a recognition that it’s bigger than individual aspirations and it’s bigger than yourself, and bigger than anything that you’ve accomplished. Because we as a country need to be stable, need to have continuity.”

The meeting between Obama and Trump was their most extended conversation. White House press secretary Josh Earnest said he thought they had met one time previously, but he could not recall the venue. There is long-standing bad blood between the two, after Trump led a public campaign to try to force Obama to disclose his long-form birth certificate in 2011 over unfounded questions from some conservatives who thought the president was not born in the United States.

During the White House Correspondents' Association dinner that year, Obama lit into Trump, mocking him before a ballroom of 2,000 guests and on live television. During the campaign, Trump promised to repeal the president's signature health-care law and overturn many of his executive actions. Obama said Trump was not to be trusted with the nation's nuclear codes and represented an existential threat to democracy.

Obama sought to play down their differences and said Trump's victory speech was magnanimous and set the right tone to help try to heal the nation's political divisions that were exposed and inflamed over the past 15 months.

“They do not have an extensive personal relationship,” Earnest said Wednesday, drawing laughs from reporters. “This is not a situation where they’ve had many conversations or played golf together or any of that business. So I guess that will be among the many, many, many reasons that tomorrow’s meeting will be rather interesting.”

After his meeting with Trump, Obama will welcome another high-profile visitor with his own large media contingent when LeBron James and the NBA champion Cleveland Cavaliers arrive for a South Lawn ceremony with the president.