Trump News Today: Biden Memoir Reveals Trump’s Letter

The trump news today comes not from a rally stage or a social media post, but from a letter written nearly six years ago and kept private until now. Former President Joe Biden's memoir prints, for the first time, the full text of the note Donald Trump left for him in the Oval Office on January 20, 2021, as Trump departed the White House after losing the 2020 election. The letter is warm, generous and strikingly personal, and it stands in sharp contrast to the years of public attacks that followed, in which Trump called Biden "sleepy," "a loser," "crooked" and worse, and baselessly claimed that the election had been stolen from him.

The revelation is the newest development in the rollout of Biden's memoir, "Promise Me, America," which is due in stores on November 17. The Atlantic published the first excerpt from the book on Monday, and that passage, which attacked Trump's role in the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, drew most of the early attention. The letter, first reported by The New York Times on Wednesday, is a different kind of disclosure: not an argument about the state of American democracy, but a private document that shows how the two men spoke to each other when no audience was watching.

The Associated Press has reviewed a photocopy of the two-page letter, which was handwritten in Trump's trademark black Sharpie on White House stationery and addressed "To '46," a nod to Biden becoming the 46th president. Its contents, now public for the first time, are likely to be quoted and argued over for days, not least because Biden himself says the private Trump he encountered left him feeling "as if there were two Donald Trumps."

The Letter Trump Left Behind

The letter was left in an envelope marked "46" on the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office, the traditional spot where an outgoing president leaves a note for the person taking over. It runs to six paragraphs, opens with "Dear Joe" and is signed simply "Donald." It is dated January 20, 2021, the day Biden was sworn in and Trump left Washington without attending the inauguration, and it was written when Trump was 74 years old and Biden was 78.

The opening passage is a celebration of the office itself. "Coming to work every day in the Oval Office is a blessing beyond imagination. History resounds from every wall, every statue, every beautiful painting and every corner of this magical place. Each staircase, hallway and door leads to yet another door and memory, another inflection point in the glorious story of America," Trump wrote. It is the language of a man who had spent four years in the room and was, in his final hours there, writing about what it had meant to him.

The letter then turns to Biden and to the job ahead of him. Trump wrote that Biden's new role meant he carried "the hopes and dreams of the entire nation on your shoulders." And in a passage that reads as both encouragement and warning, he added: "Many presidents have come and gone who simply governed as Republicans or Democrats. Largely, they did not change history, they were just swept along in its relentless tide. This will not happen to you because I know how much you love the American people."

Biden showed the note to some members of his staff after his inauguration in 2021 but did not let anyone read it in full, according to reports of the memoir. The decision to print it now, in a book that is otherwise unsparing about Trump, suggests Biden sees the letter as evidence of something important about his successor: that the private man and the public figure were, in his experience, two different people, and that the difference itself is worth understanding.

"Two Donald Trumps": The Private Meeting

The letter is not the only private exchange the memoir describes. Biden also recounts an Oval Office meeting with Trump in which the tone, by his account, was so friendly that he wondered whether he was being played. "You know, Joe, if it weren't for politics, I believe we'd be good friends," Trump told him, according to the book. "Yes, if it weren't for politics, we'd spend all our time golfing together."

Biden writes that Trump's tone toward him in that meeting "bordered on fawning," and that Trump praised his record of job creation as "extraordinary." Biden, by his own account, did not know what to make of it. "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," he wrote, and then used the meeting to give Trump what he called "a tour of the world," briefing him on the war in Ukraine, the NATO alliances, Israel and Gaza, and relations between the United States and China.

The briefing, as Biden tells it, revealed a difference in how the two men approach foreign policy. Biden said Trump "focused on the personalities" of world leaders rather than the substance of international relations, an observation that fits with the way Trump has always talked about diplomacy, as a matter of personal relationships and leverage rather than institutions and alliances. Biden writes that the two-hour meeting left him worried that Trump would dismantle much of his presidency, and that Trump's opening weeks back in office, his Day One executive orders and everything that followed, confirmed those worries.

In the memoir, Biden describes the second Trump administration as a "crueler government" that "tried to tear down institutions and inflame hatreds," and a president who "took a wrecking ball to our traditions." The private warmth of the meeting and the letter, set against that public indictment, is the tension at the heart of the book's account of Trump. Biden's phrase for it, that there seemed to be "two Donald Trumps," is likely to become one of the most quoted lines in the memoir,.

The January 6 Passage That Made Headlines First

The first excerpt from "Promise Me, America," published by The Atlantic at 5 a.m. Eastern on Monday, opened with a different Trump altogether. In it, Biden writes about the attack on the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021, in language that leaves no room for softening, and he ties the day to a broader argument that American democracy is durable but only if Americans defend it.

"Donald Trump led an insurrection," Biden wrote of the attack by Trump supporters as Congress met to certify the 2020 election that Biden had won, pulling in 81.3 million votes to Trump's 74.2 million. "What Trump did on January 6, 2021, should never be forgotten. It should follow him to his grave," he wrote, adding that Trump does not get to turn a blind eye to police officers being punched, speared, sprayed and brutalised and call himself a friend of law enforcement.

The passage drew the most attention when the excerpt was published, and it set the tone for the book's argument: that Trump has deeply damaged the country with an administration determined to "tear down institutions and inflame hatreds," and that the lies Trump spread for years about his 2020 defeat should be remembered alongside the violence they helped produce. The letter, revealed two days later, does not soften that argument, but it complicates it, by showing a Trump who could write with warmth and generosity to the very man he would spend years attacking.

A Memoir Written Through Illness

The memoir itself was announced in July and written while Biden's health was changing. Biden revealed in May 2025, less than four months after he left the White House, that he had been diagnosed with prostate cancer, and on Sunday he told the public that he "won't be able to do as many conversations" about the book as he had hoped because of his fight with the disease. He said that while doctors are encouraged by his response to treatment, his activities promoting the book will be limited because of his health.

Biden, who turns 84 on November 20, is the oldest living former president, and the book is his account of a presidency that began with a pandemic, a Capitol attack and a deeply divided country, and ended with a decision not to seek re-election and a handover to the man who had defeated him four years earlier. The memoir's title, "Promise Me, America," echoes his earlier book, "Promise Me, Dad," which chronicled the death of his son Beau and the promise Biden made to him, and it frames the new book as a promise of a different kind, to the country rather than to a family member.

What Happens Next

The book reaches stores on November 17, and the question now is how Trump responds to the letter's publication and to the memoir's broader indictment. Trump has said in the past that it was up to Biden to share the letter, and he has not, in the first hours since the contents were reported, offered a public reaction to the text itself. Whether he answers the book's charges, or the letter's warmth, or both, will shape the next round of coverage, and the White House has so far offered no comment on the memoir's claims.

What is already clear is that the letter will be read as more than a curiosity. It is a document that complicates the story both men have told about each other, and it will be quoted by Trump's supporters as evidence of his generosity and by his critics as evidence of a private decency that his public conduct has betrayed. Biden, for his part, has put it on the record as part of a book that is, above all, an argument about what Trump has done to the country. The letter, in that argument, is not an absolution. It is a piece of evidence, and one that leaves the reader to decide what it proves.

Source: The Associated Press