Former President Joe Biden said he believes his predecessor and successor was so desperate to hang on to power after losing the 2020 election that Donald Trump’s actions on January 6, 2021 should “follow him to the grave”.
Biden’s harsh words for Trump are from his new memoir, “Promise Me, America,” which goes on sale Nov. 17. In the book, he blasts Trump’s decision to grant sweeping pardons and clemency to Jan. 6 defendants on his first day back in office, as well as for not holding a ceremony honoring the officers who defended the Capitol.
“What Trump did on January 6, 2021, should never be forgotten. It should follow him to his grave,” he wrote.
Early excerpts of the memoir were published Monday by The Atlantic.
Biden also went into detail on his two-hour meeting with then President-elect Trump in November 2024 inside the Oval Office, describing a warm and friendly Trump, which surprised the 46th President.
“Trump was immediately chatty and surprised me by adopting a tone so friendly that I thought he might be putting me on,” Biden writes, adding that Trump told him, “You know, Joe, if it weren’t for politics, I believe we’d be good friends.”
Biden said he was “too stunned to respond” and that Trump continued “as if intoxicated by the curious conversational path he had chosen.”
“Yes, if it weren’t for politics, we’d spend all our time golfing together,” Trump said, according to Biden.
Biden said he cut off the compliments to move on to the business side of the meeting, but said Trump was more interested in the personalities of world leaders.
“As if we were sharing gossip about people at a dinner party, not discussing issues of global significance,” Biden wrote.
Biden said Trump’s lies have “kept coming” since taking office, starting with the “utterly discredited claim that he had defeated me in 2020.”
“And they gained momentum as Trump took a wrecking ball to our traditions and institutions—at times literally, as when he tore down the East Wing of the White House (after promising that he would not),” Biden writes.
