President Joe Biden’s sister Valerie Biden Owens writes in her new memoir Growing Up Biden that she wanted everything former President Donald Trump had touched out of the White House.
She was part of the team that redecorated the building as the new administration moved in.
The president’s sibling and longtime advisor writes that she wanted “everything Trump had touched out of there”.
She had the “chosen portrait” of the seventh President Andrew Jackson removed and replaced it “with one of President Franklin D Roosevelt”.
She writes that she added “busts of MLK, Cesar Chavez, RFK, Rosa Parks—all of which reflected Joe’s understanding and reverence for the soul of this nation”.
Ms Owens also wanted to remove the Resolute Desk used by Mr Trump and replace it with Mr Roosevelt’s but was unable to do so as it “resides at FDR’s family home in Hyde Park…. Thus, the desk Trump had sat behind remained”.
But that Mr Trump’s desk had also been used by Presidents Barack Obama and John F Kennedy made her feel better about it.
“So that was certainly good enough, and went a long way toward exorcising from my mind the repugnant image of its previous occupant,” she writes.
“If ever there was a force of anti-empathy in the world, it is Donald Trump,” she states. “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 said he “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”.
She was at first hesitant about her brother joining the campaign 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 writes.
Concerning Mr Trump not attending Mr Biden’s inauguration, Ms Owens writes that “a small man does not rise to the occasion”.
