Biden Memoir Reveals Trump's Full 2021 Handwritten Letter: 'I Know How Much You Love the American People'
Former President Joe Biden's forthcoming memoir 'Promise Me, America,' to be released next Tuesday, reprints in full for the first time the handwritten private letter Donald Trump left for him in the Oval Office on January 20, 2021, the day Trump left office after his first term. The New York Times published an excerpt of the book on November 10 and reviewed a photocopy of the original letter, bringing the nearly six-year-old secret into the open.
The letter was written on White House stationery in Trump's signature black Sharpie, in an envelope addressed 'To 46,' a reference to Biden as the 46th president. It does not criticize Biden or challenge the results of the 2020 election, and its tone is sharply at odds with Trump's public comments about Biden at the time.
Trump wrote that many presidents have come and gone who simply governed as Republicans or Democrats, largely did not change history and were swept along in its tide. He told Biden that would not happen to him 'because I know how much you love the American people.' He also wrote almost poetically about his experience working in the White House, and said he believed Biden would be true to himself and to the American people.
In his first week in office, Biden told reporters his predecessor had left him a 'very generous letter,' but he then refused for years to discuss its contents. In the book, Biden writes that the letter made it seem 'as if there were two Donald Trumps': Trump, he writes, 'deeply destabilized democracy' in public, yet here he was offering his best wishes in warm language that sounded like it was coming from an old friend.
Source: Biden memoir 'Promise Me, America'
Published by GSM · USA (original Chinese edition)
Photo: 图：拜登总统2024年7月9日在白宫椭圆形办公室通电话（资料图）。白宫官方照片，Adam Schultz 摄，公共领域，经 Wikimedia Commons，本站档案图复用另存新名。 / Photo: President Joe Biden on a call in the Oval Office of the White House on July 9, 2024 (file photo). Official White House photo by Adam Schultz, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons, GSM archive reuse under a new filename.
