Valerie Biden Owens is the sister of President Joe Biden and she’s the author of the memoir Growing Up Biden: A Memoir. In the memoir, she doesn’t tread easily on former President Donald Trump and notes the Biden family was “appalled” when he won the 2016 presidential election.

“If ever there was a force of anti-empathy in the world, it is Donald Trump,” she writes. “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.”

Valerie, who is also her brother’s close confidant, also writes that it was a huge blow for President Barack Obama and her brother, Joe Biden, serving as Vice President at the time to turn the White House over to Trump. This is especially so because Trump was “a man whose team was hell-bent on undoing everything they had accomplished.”

She also described Trump as someone who “appealed to our lowest common denominator,” during the 2016 campaign as he called to get rid of NATO, build a border wall, and “blame all your problems on the Other.”

Biden Owens also understood that “unless the tone of the country drastically changed,” her brother would run for president, especially after white supremacists held the deadly “Unite The Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia in August 2017 and Trump claimed there were “very fine people, on both sides.” Trump tried to backtrack, of course, saying that he was referring to protesters demonstrating against the removal of Confederate general Robert E. Lee.

And her brother “just couldn’t tolerate what he was seeing,” during Trump’s presidency, a time that brought “fresh degradations almost every day,” Biden Owens noted.

“Trump 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,” she wrote. “It seemed that for the first time in our lives, democracy was in peril.”

Indeed, the four years preceding the January 6, 2021, failed siege at the Capitol building were dreadful for anyone who cared for the rights of the poor and people of color, and we very nearly lost our democracy on that fateful day. Fortunately, that didn’t happen but it’s a reminder that democracy is precious.

Biden Owens has served as her brother’s longtime manager and advisor on his campaigns, and she noted she felt differently about his running in 2020 because she “thought the price was going to be too high.” She was against the idea of her family going through it again and writes of an encounter she had with former House Speaker John Boehner in which he asked her to advise Biden to forego campaigning for president because modern politics had become so vicious.

“I could see the campaign that Trump would run,” she wrote. “It was as vivid as a movie. Brutal. Crass. Classless. And every time I saw that movie I would feel sick.”

But she also understood that running against Trump would be unlike any previous presidential election because this is a man who “cares nothing about norms, civility, or truth.”

“He had the mind, not of a president, but of a vengeful dictator, and running against him felt almost degrading,” she wrote.

Biden Owens obviously found Trump nauseating, so much so that she turned off her television when he began proclaiming that he “won” the election before the results had even been called. She was confident her brother would become president but she also knew Trump would pull out all the stops to “discredit and vandalize the process before he was removed.”

For a country battle-worn by Trump’s vicious nature, Biden Owens believes her brother’s victory speech was “pitch-perfect” in healing some of the damage done and “lowering the temperature.”

“President Trump brought out the worst of our human tendencies, and the nation’s very soul had been battered by hatred, intolerance, and bigotry,” she wrote. “That night everyone craved healing. Joe radiated a bone-deep sense of understanding that comes from truly listening — in a word: empathy.”

Trump is a vile human being who laid bare the country’s racism, homophobia, misogyny, and outright fascism. It’s because of this man that white supremacists now boldly speak with little impunity. Healing is going to take a long time and while Biden has lessened some of that pain, those of us who truly believe in democracy won’t begin to heal any time soon.