- Valerie Biden Owens sounds off on Trump in her new memoir, calling him a "bully" and a "narcissistic, incompetent, and incomplete man."
- She thought the 2020 election would be unlike any other, with Trump caring "nothing about norms, civility, or truth."
- "He had the mind not of a President, but of a vengeful dictator," she wrote.
The Biden family felt "appalled" in 2016 when Donald Trump won the presidential election, Valerie Biden Owens wrote in her new memoir.
"If ever there was a force of anti-empathy in the world, it is Donald Trump," President Joe Biden's sister and confidante wrote in "Growing Up Biden," out April 12. "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."
In her memoir, Biden Owens describes the blow that it was for her brother, then the vice president, and former President Barack Obama to turn over the White House to "a man whose team was hell-bent on undoing everything they had accomplished."
Trump "appealed to our lowest common denominator" during that campaign with calls to get rid of NATO, build a wall, and "blame all your problems on the Other," she wrote.
She knew that, "unless the tone of the country drastically changed," her brother would run for president after white supremacists held a deadly Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Va., in August 2017 and Trump defended them.
Her brother "just couldn't tolerate what he was seeing" during the Trump years that brought "fresh degradations almost every day," she wrote.
"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."
Biden Owens, a longtime manager and advisor on her brother's campaigns, said she felt differently about him running in 2020 because she "thought the price was going to be too high." She didn't want her family to go through it.
"I could see the campaign 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."
She also believed running against Trump would be unlike every other election, with Trump caring "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 wrote that she turned off her television "in disgust" when she saw Trump claiming he won the election before the results had been called. She believed her brother would become president but thought Trump would do everything he could to "discredit and vandalize the process before he was removed."
She called her brother's November 7, 2020 victory speech "pitch-perfect" for promising to "lower 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."