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Trump transition live updates: President-elect raises prospect of pardons for Jan. 6 crimes

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LIMA, Peru — When President Joe Biden first took office, he treated <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/donald-trump/" target="_blank" class="contextual_link">Donald Trump</a> like the Harry Potter villain Voldemort, refusing to name him and calling him “the former guy.” It’s an approach that many of his senior advisers wish they could return to, but instead they find themselves grappling with how to treat the man who is now the incoming guy.

As Biden flew from Washington to Peru on Thursday on Air Force One, his national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, faced questions from reporters about what the president could accomplish on his last foreign trip — and seemed to grow agitated at the relentless focus not on Biden and his final trip to an international summit, but on his predecessor-turned-successor.

Are there national security concerns given that billionaire businessman Elon Musk is <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/11/08/elon-musk-trump-zelensky-call/" target=_blank>joining Trump’s calls with heads of state</a>? “I don’t have any comment about that,” Sullivan said. “I’ve just seen the reports, but they’ll make their own decisions about how they want to engage with foreign leaders.”

Might disparaging comments about Palestinians by <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/11/12/trump-huckabee-ambassador-israel/" target=_blank>Mike Huckabee</a>, Trump’s pick for ambassador to Israel, affect a deal that Biden hopes to secure for a cease-fire and hostage release in Gaza? “I didn’t see the exact comments that you’re referring to, so I can’t quite comment on it.”

Have past <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2024/11/14/tulsi-gabbard-russia-director-national-intelligence-trump/" target=_blank>remarks about Russia and Syria</a> by Trump’s choice as director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, posed problems for intelligence-sharing arrangements with European allies? “I don’t really have any comment about President Trump’s nominees or — or public comments and how they relate to the — you know, to this — this issue of intelligence,” Sullivan said.

Any comment at all on Trump’s nominees? “I do not want to do that. No. No, I do not want to do that.”

One of Biden’s stated reasons to run in 2020 was to return the country to an era when Trump was no longer front-and-center and would not occupy an outsize space in America’s collective consciousness. But now, Biden and his team finds themselves swept up in the country’s renewed focus on Trump, forced to reconcile with a tricky transition where the once and future president is all anyone will talk about.

Biden has in a sense ceded the floor to Trump by staying mostly out of view since the election. The president has no plans for a news conference during this six-day trip to Peru and Brazil, which also includes a stop in the Amazon rainforest, the first by a sitting U.S. president. Peruvian President Dina Boluarte Zegarra has invited all the leaders attending the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit to participate in a news conference, but no one from the U.S. is expected to speak.

Biden was greeted on Friday morning by Boluarte as he entered a room where the leaders were seated around a large circular table. He sat between leaders of Thailand and Vietnam, with Secretary of State Antony Blinken behind him. He was seen laughing with Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, and the two joined Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau for a photo.

In the afternoon, Biden held meetings with South Korea president Yoon Suk Yeol and the new Japanese prime minister, Ishiba Shigeru, where they discussed heightened tensions with North Korea and concerns about its growing missile and nuclear capabilities. At the start of the meeting, Biden remarked how important it was for the three countries to stay aligned.

“It was part of a much larger effort these past four years to bring together America’s Pacific allies,” he said. “And I’m proud — I’m proud of how far we’ve come since that historic meeting, promoting development in Southeast Asia and in the Pacific islands, linking arms to secure the technologies of the future and countering North Korea’s dangerous and destabilizing cooperation with Russia.”

But although the APEC summit featured the sitting president of the United States and an array of other powerful leaders, it was eclipsed in many ways by Trump’s doings back in Washington, where officials and lawmakers were digesting the startling news of the president-elect’s unorthodox cabinet nominees.

Biden appeared to allude briefly to Trump’s victory, which has prompted Yoon, the South Korean leader, to start <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2024/11/12/south-korea-yoon-trump-golf/?itid=lk_inline_manual_13" target=_blank>brushing up on his golf game</a> as a way to better bond with the president-elect.

“We’ve now reached a moment of significant political change, and I congratulate [Ishiba] for — on his taking office,” Biden said. “And this is likely to be my last trilateral meeting with this important group, but I’m proud to have helped be one of the parts of building this partnership, and I think it’s built to last.”

A senior administration official told reporters that Trump’s name did not come up during the meeting between the American, Japanese and South Korean leaders.

“What we’re focused on is the here and now, and I know that of course … there was a recognition that we’re in a period of transition,” said the official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss the private meeting. “But as we often say, there’s one president at a time.”

A short time later, at the start of a session with the Peruvian president, Biden smiled but did not respond to a question about his message to allies on the incoming Trump administration (Trump did not explicitly come up in their 90 minute meeting, a senior administration official said afterward).

On Thursday afternoon aboard Air Force One, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre stayed for more questions from reporters after Sullivan left. The first was whether the White House had concerns about Trump’s pick of Matt Gaetz as attorney general, and whether the president worried he would weaponize the Justice Department to target Biden officials or family members.

“We’re going to certainly continue to respect the process, the transition, the handoff,” Jean-Pierre said, adding that “we’re not going to comment on every personnel choice or decision that is made by the president-elect and his transition team.”

White House officials have also been grappling with a jarring disconnect between Biden’s rhetoric before the election and his actions in its aftermath. During the campaign, Biden repeatedly called Trump an existential threat to democracy, suggesting the country would no longer be the same place if he were elected.

But after the election, he not only called Trump and invited him to the White House, but released photos of the two of them smiling together and laughing.

Jean-Pierre said Biden stood by his comments that Trump was a threat to democracy, even as he attempts to oversee an orderly transition of power. “Everything that he has shared during the last, you know, almost four years about his thoughts about democracy — democracy being a threat — still stands,” she said. “That hasn’t changed.”

But Biden, she said, believes that voters have made their decision and he has a responsibility to honor that choice.

“What has changed is there was an election,” she said. “And here’s the thing: A transition, an orderly transition of power, is part of our democratic principle.”

Biden himself has yet to answer questions about how he is internalizing the events of the past week-and-a-half. While he delivered six minutes of prepared remarks on the results from the Rose Garden last week, he has not followed the example of some of his predecessors by holding a news conference.

Jean-Pierre would not say if Biden might speak more expansively at some point about the electoral earthquake that is overshadowing the final weeks of his presidency. “I just don’t have anything more to share,” she said. “He will continue to engage with the press. I don’t have anything beyond that to say.”

White House Correspondents' Association's Aldo Beckman Award for Overall Excellence in White House Coverage, 2023

Gerald R. Ford Journalism Award for Distinguished Reporting on the Presidency, 2021

White House Correspondents' Association's Merriman Smith Award, recognizing presidential news coverage under deadline pressure, 2016

Finalist for the Livingston Award for Young Journalists for national reporting, 2014

Everett McKinley Dirksen Award for Distinguished Reporting of Congress, 2013, "Broken City" series

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Matt Viser is a White House reporter for The Washington Post. He joined The Post in October 2018, covering the midterms and the 2020 presidential election before moving over to the White House to cover President Biden's administration. He was previously deputy chief of the Washington bureau for the Boston Globe.

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