President Donald Trump met with former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice Friday morning — the first publicly reported face-to-face between the two since the election season and a tête-à-tête which could signal a thawing of their previously icy relationship.
After his meeting with Rice, Trump tweeted that he had a "great meeting with a wonderful woman today, former Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice!
While the meeting with was closed to press coverage, White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer told reporters the two discussed regional threats, current foreign affairs hot spots, the battle against ISIS, as well as the challenges facing our country.
Spicer described it as a "great meeting."
Trump and Rice have a rocky history.
The former secretary of state called for him to drop out of the presidential race less than a month before Election Day and Trump criticized the Bush administration's decision to go to war in Iraq.
After a 2005 "Access Hollywood" tape showed Trump bragging about grabbing women without consent, Rice said "Enough!"
In a Facebook post and tweet in October, she wrote "Donald Trump should not be President. He should withdraw. As a Republican, I hope to support someone who has the dignity and stature to run for the highest office in the greatest democracy on earth."
Trump, for his part, was an outspoken critic of the Iraq War on the campaign trail, despite initially supporting the military action.
As a presidential candidate, Trump repeatedly said that he was against the war before it started and offered lukewarm support for the military action in an interview with Howard Stern. However, he became critical of the war months after it began.
In several campaign speeches he said that the United States would be better off if past presidents "went to the beach" instead of miring the U.S. in the Middle East conflict.
Rice sounded hopeful in an interview with Golf Channel's David Feherty when she spoke about the current administration and her hopes for the country.
"I’m hoping we won’t lose sight of what America means to the world. Because America’s an idea," she said. "We are not a people that are bound together by nationality or ethnicity or religion or race, we’re bound together by this aspiration that you can come from humble circumstances and do great things and that’s what unites us. And so I’m hoping that will again become the center of who we are and what our president speaks for."
She added that job creation, school choice, and infrastructure plans were issues she hoped Trump could make progress on. Trump himself has advocated a pro-school choice position and made job creation one of the cornerstones of his presidency.
But Rice and Trump still diverge on one important issue: Russia.
The former secretary of state told Feherty that "we’re looking at an authoritarian regime under Vladimir Putin that has systematically taken away the rights that we enjoy."
Trump has repeatedly expressed a desire to better relations with Russia and often asked campaign crowds why it would be so bad to get along with Russia and Putin.
