On the campaign trail, he was “Sleepy Joe” and the “worst president,” but in private, President Donald Trump was eye-poppingly cordial to former President Joe Biden, according to a newly published book.
Never more so when the 46th president called his successor.
“Biden called to congratulate Trump and invite him to visit the White House — the same customary courtesy that Trump had refused him four years earlier. Now Trump accepted amicably.”
“‘In another life,’” Trump told Biden, “‘we would be friends and go golfing.’”
That’s according to “2024,” an account of the 2024 presidential campaign by journalists Josh Dawsey, Tyler Pager and Isaac Arnsdorf. The political news website Axios published excerpts of the book on Tuesday.
The book relies on more than 350 post-election interviews, according to Axios. It was released on Tuesday.
The political journalist Chris Cillizza provided the fuller context of Trump’s surprise phone call on his Substack newsletter, along with his own analysis of the 45th and 47th president of the United States.
“That line might sound off to you — if you lived on Planet Earth during the 2024 campaign,” Cillizza wrote. “Because, in that race, Trump savaged Biden as totally out of it. As a bad president and, worse, a bad person. As someone who was ruining the country.
“So, how, given that, could Trump have told Biden that in another life they would have been golfing buddies?” Cillizza continued. “Simple: Trump doesn’t mean most of what he says about his political opponents.”
In the book, Dawsey, Pager and Arnsdorf, who all covered the 2024 White House campaign while they were reporters at The Washington Post, provided other nuggets.
Dawsey is now at the Wall Street Journal and Pager is now at the New York Times, according to Axios.
When former Vice President Kamala Harris had trouble joining a call with Trump to concede, aides ended up holding two phones up together on speaker so they could talk.
“You’re a tough cookie,” Trump told Harris, according to the book.
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