NOVEMBER 10, 2026
US. President Joe Biden (L) and then President-elect Donald Trump at the inauguration ceremony where President Trump was sworn in as the 47th U.S. President in the U.S. Capitol Rotunda in Washington, DC, on January 20, 2025
Former President Joe Biden has finally revealed what current U.S. President Donald Trump wrote in the “very generous” private letter he left behind in the Oval Office in 2021.
The letter’s cordial wishes and praise for Biden present a striking contrast to Trump’s public campaign to overturn his 2020 election defeat and the political hostility that has defined their relationship ever since. Biden is publishing the letter in full in his forthcoming presidential memoir, Promise Me, America, due out November 17, as the former president limits promotional appearances while undergoing cancer treatment.
The letter, dated January 20, 2021, was left in an envelope addressed “To ’46,’” referring to Biden becoming the nation’s 46th president, according to The New York Times, which obtained a book excerpt and reviewed a photocopy of the original note. Instead of disputing Biden’s victory or repeating the fraud allegations Trump made publicly, the then outgoing president wrote about the weight of the presidency and expressed confidence in his successor.
“Many presidents have come and gone who simply governed as Republicans or Democrats,” Trump wrote, according to the Times. “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,” he continued.
For Biden, the apparent disconnect between the private message and Trump’s public behavior became one of the letter’s defining features. Biden wrote in his memoir that reading it made him feel “as if there were two Donald Trumps,” describing the note as unusually warm even as he accused Trump elsewhere in the book of undermining American democracy, according to the Times.
Newsweek contacted Biden’s representatives by email on Tuesday for additional comment.
What Donald Trump Wrote to Joe Biden
Trump’s message concentrated on the presidency rather than the bitter election that preceded Biden’s inauguration. He described working in the Oval Office as an extraordinary privilege and urged Biden to stay mindful of the presidents and historic decisions that came before him, according to the Times’ review of the copy.
Trump also framed the presidency as a responsibility to Americans depending on the person occupying the office. “Not only are you joined by the past, but you carry the hopes and dreams of the entire nation on your shoulders,” he wrote, adding that millions of Americans were counting on Biden’s success.
The letter closed with a blessing for Biden, incoming first lady Jill Biden and the country. Notably absent were Trump’s claims about voter fraud, allegations against Biden, or any suggestion in the note that Trump considered himself the rightful winner of the election.
That omission matters because Trump spent the transition disputing the result. Biden had defeated him in the 2020 election, but Trump continued contesting the outcome through his final weeks in office. He also broke with modern presidential custom by skipping Biden’s inauguration, which took place the same day his conciliatory letter was dated.
Donald Trump’s Letter Contrasted With His 2020 Election Claims
Trump’s private appeal to Biden to recognize the weight of the presidency came at the end of an extraordinary transition in which he publicly refused to accept his defeat. His efforts to challenge the result culminated in the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol as Congress met to certify Biden’s victory.
That history makes the letter’s tone more consequential than a conventional presidential farewell. The note contains no attack on Biden and no challenge to the legitimacy of the incoming administration. Instead, Trump said Biden had an opportunity to determine his place in history and emphasized the responsibility he assumed as president.
Trump has continued to falsely claim that the 2020 election was rigged, and after returning to office in 2025, he granted sweeping clemency to January 6 defendants. Biden sharply condemned Trump’s actions surrounding the Capitol attack in his memoir, writing that what Trump did that day “should never be forgotten” and “should follow him to his grave,” according to the Times.
Biden also apparently argued that those who attacked law enforcement at the Capitol did not deserve clemency. His treatment of January 6 therefore contrasted sharply with the personal courtesy he described receiving from Trump in private, both in the 2021 letter and during a later Oval Office meeting.
Joe Biden Said He Saw ‘Two Donald Trumps’
Biden wrote that Trump had “deeply destabilized” American democracy and noted that Trump did not give him the customary meeting between outgoing and incoming presidents after the 2020 election. Against that backdrop, Trump’s friendly farewell struck Biden as if it had come from an entirely different version of his political rival, according to the Times.
The pattern resurfaced four years later. After Trump won the 2024 election, Biden hosted him at the White House for the transition meeting he himself had not received. In Biden’s account, Trump adopted a surprisingly friendly tone and told him: “You know, Joe, if it weren’t for politics, I believe we’d be good friends.”
Biden said the comment left him “too stunned to respond.” He also recalled Trump praising his record on job creation as “extraordinary” and saying he had been relieved not to have to run against Biden again after the Democrat ended his reelection campaign. The meeting, held on November 13, 2024, lasted nearly two hours.
Taken together, Biden’s accounts of the 2021 letter and the 2024 meeting offer a recurring theme in his memoir: Trump speaking to Biden privately with a warmth largely absent from their public political rivalry. Biden, however, does not present those encounters as softening his judgment of Trump’s record, particularly on January 6.
White House Responds to Joe Biden’s Memoir
The White House responded to the disclosure by attacking Biden rather than disputing the reported contents of Trump’s letter.
“Joe Biden should have heeded the president’s wise words, but instead he tried to destroy this country and weaponize the justice system against his political enemies,” White House communications director Steven Cheung said in a statement shared with Newsweek. “Biden is a disgrace, and America is better off with him no longer as president.”
The response continued the antagonistic public relationship that made the newly disclosed letter noteworthy. Trump’s 2021 message wished Biden success and emphasized the millions of Americans relying on his leadership, while his White House is now again portraying Biden’s presidency in starkly negative terms.
The administration has separately pushed back at Biden’s criticism of Trump’s handling of January 6. After an earlier memoir excerpt was published this week, White House spokeswoman Lauren Bis called Biden “the worst president in American history” and attacked his record on issues including the border and inflation.
‘Promise Me, America’ Arrives as Biden Battles Cancer
The revelation came a week before the November 17 publication of Promise Me, America, Biden’s account of his four years in the White House, his decision to seek reelection and his eventual withdrawal from the 2024 campaign. The memoir also addresses major events of his presidency and his assessment of Trump’s return to power.
But Biden, 83, has said his health will restrict how extensively he can promote it. He announced in May 2025 that he had been diagnosed with an aggressive form of prostate cancer that had spread to his bones. Since then, he has undergone radiation therapy and hormone treatment.
“Some days are better than others,” Biden wrote on Sunday while discussing his health and the book. “It hasn’t stopped me. But sometimes it slows me down.” He said his doctors remained encouraged by his response to treatment but that he would not be able to participate in as many conversations about the memoir as he had hoped.
Biden’s reduced public schedule means the memoir itself could carry more of the burden of shaping his post-presidential account. The newly disclosed Trump letter gives him an especially unusual artifact with which to do so: A private message of political goodwill delivered at the end of one of the most contentious presidential transitions in modern American history.
Courtesy: Newsweek
