Jill Biden has already worked out what she would and would not say to Melania Trump if the two women ever sat down together again.
Biden, 75, said she probably wouldn’t get personal with the first lady in the final installment of a four-part interview with host Jamie Kern Lima, which debuted Wednesday, Sept. 16, 2026, on “The Jamie Kern Lima Show.”
“I think I would just ask the sorts of things she was working on and what was important to her,” Biden said, answering a question about how far she would let such a conversation go.
The installment also ranged across the fairness of U.S. elections, the idea of a third term for President Donald Trump, and her first comment on the release of audio recordings of former President Joe Biden’s interviews with his memoir ghostwriter.
Steering Back to the Weather
Biden described First Lady Melania Trump as distant during their shared limousine ride to the Capitol on Inauguration Day in her memoir, “View from the East Wing,” published June 2. She portrayed the moment as awkward and strained.
John Bessler, husband of Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., rode with the two first ladies, according to the book. Melania Trump kept steering the conversation back to the weather, Biden wrote, and the book offers a reason for the chill: “Melania blamed Joe personally for the FBI searching through her private spaces at Mar-a-Lago.”
Choosing between two Ralph Lauren suits for the day, Biden went with purple. “The blue was an obvious political choice, but purple signified unity. I still believe in that,” she wrote. After the swearing-in, she recounted, Donald Trump told her, “If Joe ever needs anything, call me!”
The Recordings She Wishes Stayed Private
Biden made her first public comment on the tapes of her husband’s interviews with his ghostwriter, recordings in which he discussed sensitive information. “They were personal conversations, and I don’t think they should’ve been released,” she said.
The memoir also takes in the demolition of the East Wing. “During the demolition of the East Wing… I received pictures of the destruction step by step from people in D.C.,” she wrote, adding: “I could barely look. The social offices, gutted. The military office, flattened. What had been my office, gone.”
Why She Chose Indifference Over Hate
Asked how she reacts when she sees the president, Biden returned to a line she has often repeated: the opposite of love is not hate but indifference, and anyone who reaches indifference has won the battle. She has tried very hard to do that, she said.
Hate is negative, time-consuming and toxic, Biden said, and it eats at a person. She gets through it, she said, by reminding herself that the situation will end, that it is not forever, and that she is not going to let one person ruin the joy in her life. At that point, she said, she feels she has it conquered.
The Vote She Keeps From Joe
Biden never, ever tells anyone who she voted for, she said — not her husband, not even when he asks. Joe Biden has never known whether she voted for him.
Asked whether U.S. elections are fair, she said she hopes they are and cannot give up on what she believed the country to be. She called herself a proud American, like most Americans, and said voters have to believe their ballots matter, whether cast by mail or at a polling place. Deciding that it is all rigged, in her framing, is a place you cannot even let your head go.
She attached a qualifier: you see things, and you do question. All the states that had been blue states come to mind, Biden said, and she asks herself how it happened. She has no answers for that.
On a third Trump term, she answered no, then asked whether it isn’t in the Constitution. The 22nd Amendment holds that no person can be elected president more than twice.
Biden had no thoughts on Vice President JD Vance or Secretary of State Marco Rubio, for a plain reason: she is not going to be voting for them anyway. She said there probably should be an age limit for elected officials, though she has never thought about where the cutoff belongs, guessing somewhere in the 80s.
Her answer on a first woman winning the White House left no room for optimism. “Not in my lifetime,” she told Kern Lima, noting that she is 75 and does not know how it looks across the next 15 or 20 years she hopes to have.
