Jill Biden says the ride to Donald Trump’s January 2025 inauguration was one of the strangest conversations she has ever had to navigate. In a memoir released Tuesday, the former first lady recalled sharing a car with Melania Trump from the White House to the Capitol, with inauguration committee member John Bessler in the front seat trying to keep the mood from freezing over.
Biden wrote that the two women had met only a handful of times over the years and that the car ride became, in her words, a test of improvisation. “This would be one of few interactions Melania and I had ever had,” she wrote, adding that Bessler had “arguably one of the trickiest assignments” because he had to find “some path to relative peace in the course of that drive.”
The memoir, “View from the East Wing,” gives a rare look at a ritual that is usually photographed but not discussed: presidents travel together in one car on Inauguration Day, while their spouses ride separately. Jill Biden said that changed the feel of the day for her only slightly, because the two women had already spent years on the edges of each other’s public lives, with little direct contact and several missed invitations along the way.
Biden wrote that Donald Trump did not invite Joe Biden to the traditional postelection White House meeting after the 2020 election, and that Melania Trump did not invite her to the customary first-lady tea in 2021. When Trump won a second, non-consecutive term in 2024, she said, the Bidens invited him and Melania Trump back to the White House, and he accepted. Melania Trump declined, citing a prior commitment.
Even so, Biden said she later called Melania Trump after Trump survived the assassination attempt at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, and found her “polite and controlled as ever.” She also wrote that they briefly crossed paths at Rosalynn Carter’s funeral in 2023 and Jimmy Carter’s funeral in 2024, but that the January ride was different. Bessler asked about Barron Trump’s experience at New York University, Biden asked how Melania Trump’s father was doing after her mother’s death, and Melania Trump kept trying to steer the conversation to the weather. “I tried to get with Melania’s weather-only program,” Biden wrote.
The exchange stayed frosty enough that Biden said she even felt sorry for the military dogs along the route because of the cold. She wrote that Melania Trump said Barron Trump had never wanted a dog, and she added that the former first lady later blamed President Joe Biden directly for the FBI search of Mar-a-Lago. Biden also wrote that she left Melania Trump a handwritten note and a vase of flowers at the White House before departing, and later learned a staff member had slipped a separate letter underneath hers. “The presumption,” she wrote, “still frosted me.”
The account leaves one part of the ride unresolved: beyond the weather talk and a few careful questions, Biden does not say what Melania Trump was thinking for much of the trip. What the memoir does make clear is that the handoff of power in January 2025 carried more strain than the public ceremony suggested, and that the distance between the two first ladies was still visible in the car on the way to the Capitol.
