President Joe Biden encountered a very different version of Donald Trump when the pair met privately in the Oval Office after the 2024 election.
In an excerpt from his forthcoming memoir, “Promise Me, America,” the 46th president recounted a meeting eight days after the election in which Trump was so warm that it left Biden speechless.
“Trump was immediately chatty and surprised me by adopting a tone so friendly that I thought he might be putting me on,” Biden wrote in the excerpt published in The Atlantic on Monday. “It bordered on fawning.”
Trump reportedly said, “You know, Joe, if it weren’t for politics, I believe we’d be good friends.”
“I think I blinked, too stunned to respond,” Biden wrote.
Biden also noted that Trump seemed “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.
After years of publicly excoriating Biden’s work in the White House, Trump also allegedly praised his predecessor for his “extraordinary” job-creation efforts and said he was “relieved he didn’t have to run against me.”
“I didn’t really understand why he was buttering me up, so I cut off his compliments to move on to the business at hand,” Biden wrote.
Throughout Trump’s decade in politics, he has rarely had a kind thing to say about Biden, often referring to him as “Sleepy Joe,” “Crooked Joe” and “Crazy Joe.” When Biden won the 2020 presidential election, Trump became consumed by conspiracies that his rival had rigged the election with the help of the Democratic Party, claims he continues to repeat and promote to this day.
Since Trump returned to office in January 2025, he and his top officials have also made Biden a scapegoat for a range of issues, including America’s inflation woes, immigration challenges and foreign policy quandaries.