Election 2020
Biden’s Sister Says She Had Trump ‘Exorcised’ From the White House in New Memoir
When Donald Trump left the White House for the last time, many people called for it to be disinfected. That would be hilarious if it were any other president except Trump. Valerie Biden Owens, the sister of President Joe Biden apparently felt the same way, Insider reports. Biden Owens wanted everything “touched” by Trump removed after her brother moved in.
Who can blame her? Considering Trump’s nasty habits I’d want to fumigate the place too. In her new autobiography Growing Up Biden: A Memoir Owens wrote about the happiness she felt for her brother and First Lady Jill Biden as they climbed the stairs and walked through the front doors to the White House Grand Foyer.
The president and first lady were unable to enter initially, but once inside, the family was moved by the history of the place. Owens was fortunate enough to share this with her husband John “Jack” Owens, and her brother, James “Jimmy” Biden.
“I wanted a moment alone with my thoughts, so I stepped into one of the rooms in the family quarters,” she writes. “Soon Jack, and Jimmy joined me while the rest of the family was being given a tour.”
“Before we knew it, the three of us were walking down that famous colonnade into the Oval Office.”
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In her book, released April 12, Owens spoke of her admiration of the historic room, adding that her brother Joe sought help in redecorating from the historian Jon Meacham. Jimmy chose the rugs, sofas, and decorations.
One notable item was removed.
“He replaced Trump’s chosen portrait of Andrew Jackson with one of President Franklin D. Roosevelt and added busts of MLK, Cesar Chavez, RFK, Rosa Parks — all of which reflected Joe’s understanding and reverence for the soul of this nation. Already the Oval Office had begun to look more like the United States,” she added.
“We tried to get FDR’s Oval Office desk — I wanted everything Trump had touched out of there — but to this day, the desk resides at FDR’s family home in Hyde Park. … Thus, the desk that Trump had sat behind remained. It was the Resolute desk — the same one used by [Presidents John F.] Kennedy and [Barack] Obama, so that was certainly good enough, and went a long way toward exercising from my mind the repugnant image of its previous occupant.”
Throughout the book, Owens lets her distaste for the “previous occupant” be known, at one point calling him “a bully,” and a “narcissistic, incompetent, and incomplete man.”
And on November 7, 2020, when Biden and his running mate Kamala Harris delivered victory speeches in Wilmington, Delaware, Owens said she finally felt the beginnings of hope for the weeks ahead.
She knew this was a time for healing.
“President Trump brought out the worst of our human tendencies (no kidding!), and the nation’s very soul had been battered by hatred, intolerance, and bigotry,” Owens writes. “That night, everyone craved healing. Joe radiated a bone-deep sense of understanding that comes from truly listening — in a word: empathy.”
And she wasn’t surprised that Trump was absent during Biden’s inauguration.
“A small man does not rise to the occasion,” she writes.
Trump’s legacy will consist of conspiracy theories, racism, xenophobia, nationalism, misogyny, and a failed attempt to destroy democracy. For me, he’ll be easy to forget.
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