Jill Biden says the ride to Donald Trump’s January 2025 inauguration was awkward from the moment she and Melania Trump got into the car. In excerpts from her memoir, Biden describes a tense, largely one-sided conversation in which Melania Trump kept trying to steer things toward the weather while the former first lady pressed ahead with small talk.
The excerpts surfaced now because they add a fresh, personal account to one of the most watched transitions in recent presidential history. John Bessler, who was assigned to escort both first ladies to the ceremony, was described by Biden as facing “arguably one of the trickiest assignments” in trying to break the ice between two women with little history and even less warmth.
Biden says she asked Melania Trump about her father and got a brief update in return. Trump, she wrote, said her father was doing well and was with them, then added, “But you know, it’s only been a year.” She also described Trump volunteering details about Barron, saying he had not wanted a dog, attended New York University, lived on a floor in Trump Tower, went to class and was brought back, and did not see many friends at school, though he had friends from high school.
What makes the account more revealing is how little of a relationship Biden says the two women had before that ride. She wrote that Trump had not invited her to the traditional incoming-outgoing-first-lady tea in 2021 and turned down Biden’s invitation in 2024. Their only earlier encounters, she wrote, were brief moments at Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter’s funerals, even though Biden said she sent Trump a birthday card each year.
The memoir also draws a line from that distance to a sharper grievance. Biden wrote that Trump blamed President Joe Biden directly for the FBI search of Mar-a-Lago, while she said she felt compassion for Trump because she had gone through a similar search herself and knew how distressing it was to have agents rummage through an underwear drawer. That mix of sympathy and resentment sits underneath the car ride and helps explain why Bessler’s job, in Biden’s telling, was never going to be easy.
Biden says she left Trump a handwritten note and a vase of flowers at the White House before departing, only to learn later that a staff member had slipped a separate letter underneath hers, which she described as “insinuating oneself into a private historic tradition between two women.” The presumption, she wrote, “still frosted me.” After the inauguration, Biden said she nudged Doug Emhoff when Donald Trump’s speech turned particularly bombastic, and she laughed as Hillary Clinton reacted to Trump’s remark about renaming the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America. She and Joe Biden then boarded Marine One for the last time, and she told him, “Wow, Joe, this is really full circle,” before they lifted off over Washington and headed first to Joint Base Andrews and then to Santa Ynez, California.
