President Joe Biden’s sister, Valerie Biden Owens, has recently penned a memoir, Growing Up Biden, that’s chock full of so many amazing stories about her childhood and life as the youngest of the four Biden children. But sweet, sad, and heartwarming stories about the Biden family’s childhood aren’t the only thing you’ll find in Ms. Biden Owens’ new tell-all.
According to a new report from Vanity Fair, Valerie uses the pages of her new memoir to tell of her experiences when her big brother was officially voted in and inaugurated as the 46th President of the United States and made the big move into the White House with his wife, First Lady Dr. Jill Biden, and their dogs. While Valerie’s tellings about this time are plentiful and equally amazing, this one has gotta be our all-time favorite so far.
It’s fairly customary for an incoming First Family to tweak the interior decor of the White House to fit their personal styles and tastes. As noted by Vanity Fair, Gerald Ford had striped couches brought in. George W. Bush painted the walls of the Oval Office ecru — the color of unbleached linens. Former President Barack Obama replaced most of the “19th-century still lifes, pastorals and portraits that dominate[d] the…public rooms” with “bold, abstract art works.”
However, the most recent transition saw what was likely some of the most drastic changes the White House has ever experienced as, according to Valerie Biden Owens, she was personally dead set on ridding her brother’s new home for at least the next four years of even the spirit of his predecessor, Donald Trump.
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In her new memoir that was published this week, Biden Owens said that, as part of the team that worked to decorate the Oval Office upon her brother’s inauguration, she personally wanted “everything Trump had touched out of there.” Valerie immediately got rid of the former guy’s “chosen portrait” of the controversial ethnic cleanser and populist president Andrew Jackson and replaced it “with one of President Franklin D. Roosevelt.” She also added “busts of MLK, Cesar Chavez, RFK, Rosa Parks—all of which reflected Joe’s understanding and reverence for the soul of this nation.”
Valerie explained that she really wanted to do away with the Oval Office Resolute Desk that Trump had sat behind for those four long, tumultuous years and replace it with FDR’s. However, she ultimately wasn’t able to do so, as Roosevelt’s desk “resides at FDR’s family home in Hyde Park…. Thus, the desk Trump had sat behind remained.” But, she wrote that the fact that the likes of JFK and Obama had used that same desk made her feel a bit better about having to keep it and her big brother using the desk to sign documents that would begin to undo all the damage his predecessor had created behind that same desk.
“So that was certainly good enough, and went a long way toward exorcising from my mind the repugnant image of its previous occupant,” her memoir reads.
On the topic of exorcisms, Valerie expressed her beliefs, in line with so many millions of other Americans, that Donald Trump is the epitome of true evil. “If ever there was a force of anti-empathy in the world, it is Donald Trump. He is a bully, pure and simple—a narcissistic, incompetent, and incomplete man. He is the embodiment of resentment. His power comes from tapping into our baser instincts.” She wrote that Trump “appealed to our lowest common denominator” and “didn’t just represent policy failure or erratic personal behaviors; he represented something darker, more primal, more insinuating, striking deeper into the heart of what made us who we are.”
Valerie admits that she was initially hesitant to see her big brother running for the highest office in the nation, because she “could see the campaign Trump would run. It was as vivid as a movie. Brutal. Crass. Classless. And every time I saw that movie, I would feel sick.”
“He had the mind not of a President, but of a vengeful dictator, and running against him felt almost degrading,” she wrote.
Valerie also added that she wasn’t at all surprised that her big brother’s predecessor didn’t show his face at the inauguration essentially because, as echoed by Vanity Fair, “he’s a little bitch.”
“A small man does not rise to the occasion,” Valerie fired.
I hope Trump is looking for some new reading material.
Featured image via screen capture/Flickr – Gage Skidmore, under Creative Commons license 2.0
