The most uncomfortable ride of Jill Biden’s White House career lasted just a few miles, featuring a stone-faced Melania Trump.
In her new memoir, A View from the East Wing, the former first lady describes a frosty journey from the White House to the Capitol on Jan. 20, 2025, as Donald Trump prepared to take office for a second time. The details were relased by the Washington Post and the Independent, who obtained a copy of the book ahead of its release on Tuesday.
Biden said the encounter came after welcoming the Trumps to the White House for the traditional pre-inauguration tea before the two first ladies climbed into a motorcade bound for the U.S. Capitol.
The former first lady suggested the tension stemmed in part from Melania’s belief that President Joe Biden was personally responsible for the FBI search of Mar-a-Lago.
“Melania blamed Joe personally for the FBI searching through her private spaces at Mar-a-Lago,” Biden wrote.
“I have compassion for her, having been subject to the same kind of search. I knew how distressing it was to have agents rummage through your underwear drawer.”
The ride also included John Bessler, the husband of Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar, who had been enlisted by the inauguration committee as a conversational buffer between the incoming and outgoing first ladies.
“I don’t know how long this has been tradition, but it certainly helps with the awkwardness,” Biden wrote, joking that Bessler “must have drawn the shortest of all possible straws.”
Bessler attempted to keep the conversation flowing by asking Melania about her son Barron Trump’s studies at New York University.
“‘NYU,’ Melania said, looking out the window,” Biden recalled.
“Melania kept trying to switch the topic to the weather.”
The motorcade anecdote is one of several new revelations in the memoir, which offers Biden’s account of the tumultuous final months of her husband’s presidency and the transition back to Trump, including her interactions with Melania.
Biden said one of her few other moments with Melania came after the assassination attempt on Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania, in 2024, when she called to check on her and Barron.
Melania was “polite and controlled as ever,” she wrote.
Biden also noted that Melania declined her invitation to the traditional inauguration tea in 2021 and did not extend the same courtesy when the Trumps returned to the White House in 2025.
Elsewhere in the book, Biden describes her shock at seeing Trump’s demolition of the White House East Wing to make way for a new ballroom.
“The social offices, gutted. The military office, flattened. What had been my office, gone,” she wrote.
“The innards of the East Wing were spread out for everyone to see, like a rare and precious animal that had been hunted down and killed.”
The memoir has already drawn a furious response from Trump, who seized on Biden’s account of her husband’s disastrous 2024 debate performance.
Trump mocked the former first lady on Truth Social for writing of her fear that her husband was suffering a stroke on stage.
“She thought he was having a ‘stroke,’ and various other really bad things, and yet never rushed onto the stage to help her troubled husband, as any good wife would do,” he wrote.
Biden has continued to defend her husband in interviews promoting the memoir.
“When all Americans saw that moment on TV at the debate, I mean, I was frightened out of my mind, because I thought, ‘Oh my God, he’s having a stroke,’” Biden said on The View on Tuesday.
She said doctors assured her afterward that her husband was fine, but acknowledged she still has no explanation for what happened.
“To this day, I still cannot say, like, what happened in that moment,” she said. “What happened? I don’t know.”
The Daily Beast reached out to the White House and Biden for comment.
