Donald J. Trump left Joseph R. Biden Jr. a Jan. 20, 2021 letter in the Oval Office that Biden now describes as so warm it felt like it came from a different man. Biden said the note was a “very generous letter,” and in his new book he wrote that it was “as if there were two Donald Trumps.”
The letter surfaced because Biden reprints it in an excerpt from Promise Me, America published Monday. It is dated the day Trump left office, tucked inside an envelope addressed to “46,” and written on White House stationery with Trump’s black Sharpie signature. The Times reviewed a photocopy of the original letter, which said Biden would “be true to yourself and the American people” and added that many presidents have come and gone who simply governed as Republicans or Democrats.
Trump’s private tone stands out because his public conduct around the transfer of power was the opposite. During the 2020 campaign he called Biden the “worst candidate in American history,” then challenged the election results after Biden won, a fight that culminated in the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. After that, Trump refused to attend Biden’s inauguration, and Biden wrote that Trump “deeply destabilized our democracy.”
The letter also sat alongside a claim Trump made in it that “This will not happen to you because I know how much you love the American people.” That is the sharpest line in the contrast Biden is drawing: a departing president who wrote in praise of his successor while publicly trying to tear him down. Biden also wrote that Trump had not offered the traditional meeting between presidents, even though he later described a traditional meeting with Trump after his 2024 election win, when Trump told him, “You know, Joe, if it weren’t for politics, I believe we’d be good friends.”
The White House response only widened the gap. Steven Cheung said Biden should have heeded Trump’s “wise words,” but instead tried to destroy the country and weaponize the justice system against his political enemies. For readers, the new detail is not that Trump can sound gracious in private; it is that Biden is now publishing the words that make that split impossible to ignore, with Promise Me, America due next Tuesday.
