Former President Joseph R. Biden had harsh words for President Trump in his new memoir, in which he condemns the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol and said his successor fawned over him during a meeting to discuss the transition of power in 2024.
In excerpts released Monday from Mr. Biden’s upcoming memoir, “Promise Me, America,” he said Mr. Trump should be haunted by the Jan. 6 riot in which a pro-Trump mob stormed the Capitol to prevent Congress from certifying the 2020 presidential election results.
“Here’s my view: 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,” Mr. Biden wrote. “What Trump did on January 6, 2021 should never be forgotten. It should follow him to his grave.”
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Mr. Biden said Mr. Trump and his supporters “continue to preen and posture like they’re supporters of law enforcement,” and he condemned the nearly 1,600 pardons issued by Mr. Trump for those charged or convicted in connection with the attack.
“The criminals who attacked law-enforcement officers that day didn’t deserve pardons. They deserved prison terms,” Mr. Biden wrote.
Excerpts of the memoir were published Monday by The Atlantic.
Mr. Biden also revealed what happened inside the Oval Office during his nearly two-hour meeting with Mr. Trump just eight days after the 2024 election in which Mr. Trump bested Vice President Kamala Harris. Mr. Biden withdrew from the race in July 2024.
He wrote that Mr. Trump’s tone took him aback, which he said “bordered on fawning.” Mr. Biden said Mr. Trump told him that “if it weren’t for politics, I believe we’d be good friends.” He said the remark left him “too stunned to respond.
“Trump was immediately chatty and surprised me by adopting a tone so friendly that I thought he might be putting me on,” Mr. Biden writes, adding that Mr. Trump told him, “‘Yes, if it weren’t for politics, we’d spend all our time golfing together.’”
Mr. Trump called Mr. Biden’s record on job creation “extraordinary” and said he was “relieved that he didn’t have to run against me,” according to the excerpts.
Mr. Biden said he cut off the compliments to focus on business, but as he gave a wide-ranging overview of issues that could define the Trump presidency, he said Mr. Trump was more focused on the personalities of world leaders.
“As if we were sharing gossip about people at a dinner party, not discussing issues of global significance,” Mr. Biden wrote.
The former president is also highly critical of Mr. Trump’s second term in office, saying his “lies’ have “kept coming” since taking office, starting with the “utterly discredited claim that he had defeated me in 2020.
“And they gained momentum as Trump took a wrecking ball to our traditions and institutions — at times literally, as when he tore down the East Wing of the White House (after promising that he would not),” Mr. Biden wrote.
Presidential policies are vulnerable to politics and can be undone at the whims of their successor, Mr. Biden said in the book, saying, “that feeling was magnified by the dismissive and destructive nature of Donald Trump.”
The former president said Mr. Trump “seemed unable to tolerate the idea that someone else’s accomplishments might be worth building on rather than tearing down.”
He criticized Mr. Trump’s cost-cutting Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, and the decisions to cut federal funding to Democratic states, gut nonprofits and withdraw from the World Health Organization.
“It was clearly going to be a crueler government,” Mr. Biden wrote.
“It was also going to be a government that stoked racial tensions instead of calming them. The new administration would launch a campaign to end the birthright-citizenship protections of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, a proud legacy of the Civil War. ICE officers would comb American cities, using expanded police powers to round up brown and Black people and detain them far from the courts and local police. We would be a less tolerant society, with raging conspiracy theories actively promoted by the White House and Trump’s constant and increasingly unhinged social-media feed.”
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