Joe Biden is hawking a new memoir by trashing Donald Trump’s ballroom as a monument to the President’s ego.
His Democrat cheerleaders call the sour-grapes book tour a statesman’s farewell.
And Biden just admitted to sitting on one piece of paper that wrecks his whole story.
Joe Biden Saved His Sharpest Words for a Ballroom
Joe Biden welcomed People magazine into his home in Wilmington, Delaware, for what the magazine called his only new interview promoting his memoir, Promise Me, America.
He didn’t waste the opportunity on nostalgia. People’s Nick Maslow asked the former President how he felt about the ballroom President Trump is building where the East Wing used to stand, and Biden went straight for the gold trim.
“Almost as disturbing as the gold bars on the walls of the White House and the Oval Office,” Biden said. “I mean, what the hell are we talking about? I find it disturbing . . . I’ve viewed the president’s judgment in tearing down the East Wing and a number of other things as nothing more than to try to create monuments to himself: ‘I built that.’ I find it beneath the country.”
Beneath the country. That’s quite a verdict from the man who handed Americans a wide-open border and the worst inflation in four decades.
And Biden skipped a few details. Trump and a roster of private donors are footing the bill, which the President has pegged at roughly $300 million, and Trump has promised taxpayers won’t cover a dime of it. Presidents have remodeled that house for generations, too. Harry Truman gutted the residence down to its outer walls between 1949 and 1952, and nobody accused him of building a shrine to Harry.
But the “monuments to himself” line sounds a little funny coming from a man on a book tour. Former presidents build libraries, sell memoirs, and polish their legacies for a living. Biden might want to go easy on the vanity lectures while he’s out peddling his own.
Joe Biden Locked Away the Kindest Words Trump Ever Wrote Him
Here’s where the interview took a turn Democrats won’t enjoy.
Maslow asked about the letter Trump left in the Oval Office on January 20, 2021. Trump wrote it by hand in his trademark black Sharpie on White House stationery and sealed it in an envelope addressed “To ‘46.’”
Biden told reporters that same day that “the president wrote a very generous letter.” Then he kept every word of it to himself for nearly six years.
The public finally got a look when the New York Times obtained an excerpt of the memoir, which reprints the note in full. Trump wished his successor well and told him he would “be true to yourself and the American people.” He wrote that the job meant carrying “the hopes and dreams of the entire nation,” a weight he called “the anchor that grounds every decision you make.”
Trump didn’t take a single shot at Biden in the letter. He closed with a blessing: “May God bless you and Jill, and may God bless America!”
Even Biden couldn’t deny the class on display. “That could have been written by President [John F.] Kennedy to me or by President [Lyndon] Johnson or by George Bush,” he told People. “I mean, it was gracious, it was generous, and it was totally inconsistent with the kind of president he’d been.”
In the memoir itself, Biden writes that reading the letter felt “as if there were two Donald Trumps.”
Maybe Biden simply honored an old tradition of keeping these notes private. Except he didn’t keep it private. He held onto it until he had something to sell.
And look at what Biden did while that letter sat in his files. He ran an entire 2024 campaign branding Trump a threat to democracy. On July 8, 2024, he told donors on a private call, “So, we’re done talking about the debate. It’s time to put Trump in the bullseye.”
Five days later, a gunman opened fire on Trump at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, and a bullet grazed the President’s ear. Biden later told NBC News the bullseye remark was a “mistake.”
Biden had Trump’s own words of goodwill tucked away the whole time. He let his party paint the author as a monster anyway.
Biden’s Pardon Excuse Crashes Into Trump’s Handwriting
That letter also trips up the other big excuse Biden served People.
Asked about pardoning his son Hunter, Biden didn’t blink. “I watched the modus operandi of Trump,” he said. “He goes after people without any basis, whether they’re viewed as an enemy. I knew what he would do.”
Biden claimed that without his pardons, Trump would have gone after family members and anyone else tied to him, to “try to do harm to them, as I’ve observed.”
Without any basis? A Delaware jury convicted Hunter Biden on three felony gun charges in June 2024. That September, Hunter pleaded guilty to nine federal tax charges in California. Joe Biden had told ABC News he wouldn’t pardon his son. He did it anyway in December 2024, wiping away offenses reaching all the way back to January 1, 2014.
Then, in the final hours of his presidency, Biden handed preemptive pardons to his brothers, his sister, and their spouses.
But now he wants Americans to believe Trump forced his hand, the same Trump who asked God to bless Jill Biden on his way out the door. Biden can’t keep both versions of the man in the same book.
Joe Biden Rewrote the Debate That Ended His Career
Biden saved his most jaw-dropping line for the night in Atlanta.
“Look, I don’t know anybody who hasn’t made a mistake in a debate. To me, it was not very consequential,” Biden told People. “First of all, I thought there’d be another debate, which there wasn’t. But notwithstanding the fact that there wasn’t another debate, it didn’t disturb me because it wasn’t consequential.”
Not very consequential. The debate took place on June 27, 2024. Biden quit the race on July 21, just 24 days later, after party leaders and Hollywood donors spent three weeks shoving him toward the exit.
Remember that donor call? Biden announced on July 8 that he was “done” talking about the debate. Thirteen days later, the debate was done with him.
And the warning signs came long before Atlanta. In February 2024, Special Counsel Robert Hur described Biden in his report as “a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.” The White House brushed it off, and top Democrats lined up to swear the President was sharp as a tack behind closed doors.
Biden still isn’t budging. “I believe that on an objective basis, I was the best-equipped person to do the job,” he told the magazine.
He also said he would have stepped aside if he’d known he had cancer. Biden’s fight with metastatic prostate cancer, diagnosed in 2025 after he left office, deserves the sympathy of every American, whatever their politics.
But the debate didn’t expose a tumor. It exposed the decline Hur had already put on paper, the one Democrats insisted voters were imagining.
The Party That Can’t Read Its Own Mail
Biden isn’t some retiree puttering around a garden. He’s the elder statesman of a party already gearing up for 2028, and Kamala Harris sat beside him for four years.
Every Democrat hopeful will face the same question about what they knew and when. Biden’s book hands them no cover. It doubles down on the cover-up and dares voters to call it what it was.
Hollywood can’t even handle the letter. Jimmy Kimmel, whose ratings keep sinking under the weight of his nightly anti-Trump sermons, told his audience, “First of all, there’s no way he wrote that.” The late-night crowd would rather believe a ghostwriter exists than admit Trump showed his predecessor some grace.
So expect the networks to treat the memoir’s release on November 17 like a state occasion. Expect gauzy interviews about legacy and decency, with hardly a word about the debate, the pardons, or the bullseye.
Joe Biden kept the most generous words Donald Trump ever wrote him locked away for nearly six years. He only let the country read that piece of paper once he had a book to sell.
Sources: Mediaite; People; The Hill; NewsNation; Fox News; KFBK/iHeartMedia; The New York Times via La Voce di New York and Clash Report; HuffPost; Malay Mail; CNN; PBS NewsHour/Associated Press; LBC; CBS News; Reuters; Washington Examiner