'Nauseating' White House meeting shows Trumps will do whatever they want: columnist

President Joe Biden’s warm welcome of Donald Trump in the Oval Office on Wednesday – fire roaring and all – seemed to be quite the “cozy moment,” according to a New York Times columnist, who wondered: “So why did it feel so nauseating?”

And it wasn’t just the “gracious” display put on by Trump during the presidential encounter four years after he refused to concede his own race that was unsettling, Times opinion columnist Maureen Dowd wrote in her piece, adding that Biden was also hard to watch “because he was confronting a monster of his own making.”

“If Biden had not bogarted the presidency, if he had not run for a second term, the Democrats would have had time to put together a stronger, centrist ticket with governors of swing states. Trump’s gloating chariot ride up Pennsylvania Avenue might never have happened,” Dowd told readers hours after the Oval Office meeting.

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Dowd also took away from Wednesday's meeting that it was “hard not to imagine” that Biden, who she noted was “an institutionalist” must’ve had “a frisson of satisfaction” as Trump stepped back into the White House.

“Because, in his view, it ratified his contention that he was the only one who could have beaten Trump," Dowd wrote.

But Trump's showing also exposed his own weaknesses, according to the columnist.

“When he loses, he tries to burn the democracy down,” Dowd said, adding that being gracious only when you win isn’t “a good lesson for the children of America.”

But, she added, “the most telling signal” of the Trump-Biden meeting may have been sent by Melania Trump, who was a no-show. Melania’s absence, according to Dowd, was a way for the Trumps to say, “This time, they’re going to do any damn thing they want. They’re going to run the country like one of Trump’s companies. Tradition will be subsumed by Trumpism. And that’s a very unsettling thought.”