Former President Joe Biden revealed that President Donald Trump privately told him they would be “good friends” just days after leading what he said was an insurrection at the Capitol, leaving the former president “too stunned to respond.”
Biden described the meeting, held eight days after the 2024 election, in an excerpt from his White House memoir, “Promise Me, America,” that The Atlantic published Monday.
The same excerpt says Trump “led an insurrection” on Jan. 6, 2021, and that what he did that day “should follow him to his grave.”
Biden wrote that Trump’s tone in the Oval Office was so friendly that it “bordered on fawning.”
“You know, Joe, if it weren’t for politics, I believe we’d be good friends,” Trump told him, according to Biden.
“I think I blinked, too stunned to respond,” Biden wrote.
“Yes, if it weren’t for politics, we’d spend all our time golfing together,” Trump continued, according to Biden.
Biden wrote that Trump called his record on job creation “extraordinary” and said he had been relieved he didn’t have to run against Biden.
“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.
Biden recalled that the meeting did not ease his worry that Trump would dismantle his policies, and that once in office, Trump “pardoned nearly 1,600 insurrectionists who had been convicted for their violent acts on January 6, 2021.”
“In the new regime, it was as if that terrible day had never happened at all. Indeed, that seemed to be the point,” Biden wrote.
The man who told Biden they would be “good friends” is the one Biden goes on to accuse of leading an insurrection.
“Donald Trump led an insurrection. His goal was to remain in power after the American people had voted him out of office. That’s the truth. It was a violent assault,” Biden wrote.
“The criminals who attacked law-enforcement officers that day didn’t deserve pardons. They deserved prison terms,” he added.
“You don’t get to turn a blind eye to cops being punched, speared, sprayed, and brutalized and call yourself a friend of law enforcement,” Biden wrote. “What Trump did on January 6, 2021, should never be forgotten. It should follow him to his grave.”
Trump’s pardon proclamation said the clemency “ends a grave national injustice." NBC News said it had asked the White House for comment on the excerpt.
Biden wrote that the rioters deserved prison. He stopped short of saying Trump should have been convicted over Jan. 6, an outcome his own Justice Department took years to seek and never secured.
Biden’s attorney general, Merrick Garland, named Jack Smith special counsel in November 2022 to oversee key parts of the Jan. 6 investigation. Smith eventually charged Trump in August 2023, more than 2 1/2 years after the attack.
After Trump won the 2024 election, Smith asked judges to drop the case, citing the Justice Department’s policy against prosecuting a sitting president, Business Insider reported.
Smith’s final report said that but for Trump’s election, the evidence was “sufficient to obtain and sustain a conviction at trial." Trump had pleaded not guilty to the charges.
Trump responded on Truth Social by calling Smith “a lamebrain prosecutor who was unable to get his case tried before the Election,” according to Business Insider.
Biden wrote that the Supreme Court’s 2024 immunity ruling was “a death knell for accountability.”
Biden’s full memoir is due Nov. 17, and he said his health will limit his promotion of the book as he undergoes cancer treatment, The Associated Press reported.