On January 20, 2025, Jill Biden and Melania Trump shared a motorcade ride from the White House to the Capitol. The distance itself was only a few miles, but Jill Biden’s new memoir suggests the trip felt much longer. She has now written about the moment in detail, and the conversation appears to have been pretty limited.
In A View from the East Wing, released Tuesday, Biden describes the inauguration day journey with details that suggest it stayed with her long after it ended. To help ease things along, the inauguration committee enlisted attorney John Bessler, husband of Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar, to join the motorcade as a conversational buffer.
Biden described his assignment as “arguably one of the trickiest” of the day, writing that he “must have drawn the shortest of all possible straws.” Bessler tried to keep the discussion moving by asking Melania about Barron’s studies at New York University, although the exchange never really took off.
The answer, according to Biden, was brief enough to end almost as soon as it started. “‘NYU,’ Melania said, looking out the window,” Biden recalled. “Melania kept trying to switch the topic to the weather.”
Stay up-to-date with the latest news!
Subscribe and start recieving our daily emails.
That moment also became part of a larger story running through Biden’s memoir. She describes a relationship that never fully warmed over the years and suggests that unresolved frustrations had been sitting there long before the two women found themselves sharing a ride together that morning.
Biden writes that Melania blamed Joe Biden personally for the FBI search of Mar-a-Lago in 2022, something she suggests continued to linger.
“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.”
Their interactions across both administrations have also remained limited and often distant. Melania declined Jill’s invitation to the traditional inaugural tea in 2021, and when the roles later reversed in 2025, Jill did not receive the same invitation.
Even so, Biden also recalls what she describes as one of their few more cordial moments, a phone call she made after the Butler assassination attempt in 2024 to check on Melania and Barron. Melania, Biden writes, was “polite and controlled as ever.”
The memoir later shifts from relationships to the White House itself, with Biden reflecting on changes made to the East Wing and the disappearance of spaces she once knew well. “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 ballroom project began with a $200 million estimate and has since climbed to roughly $400 million, while congressional Republicans have separately pursued $1 billion in taxpayer funding tied to security upgrades around the project.
Featured image via YouTube screengrab
