Jill Biden has decided what she would and would not bring up if she ever sat down again with the woman who followed her into the East Wing.
Biden, 75, said she “probably wouldn’t get personal” if she and First Lady Melania Trump got together now, in the final part of a four-part interview with host Jamie Kern Lima that 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.
She also addressed the release of audio recordings from former President Joe Biden’s conversations with his biographer, which included discussions of classified material. “They were personal conversations, and I don’t think they should’ve been released,” she said.
Distant on the Ride to the Capitol
In her memoir, “View from the East Wing,” published in June 2026, Biden described Melania Trump as distant during the limousine ride the two women shared to the Capitol on Inauguration Day.
Biden gave an explanation for the tension in the car. “Melania blamed Joe personally for the FBI searching through her private spaces at Mar-a-Lago,” Biden wrote, adding, “I have compassion for her, having been subject to the same kind of search.” John Bessler, the husband of Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar, rode with the two first ladies.
Biden also wrote that she could barely look at the photos of the East Wing demolition that people in Washington sent her.
An Executive Order in the Rose Garden
Melania Trump appeared in the Rose Garden with President Donald Trump on Oct. 19 as he signed an executive order on women’s health. The order creates a women’s health division within the National Institutes of Health and a White House task force on women’s health.
“Our generation will fight to discover the cures that will ensure a woman can live her life in health and to the fullest,” Mrs. Trump remarked.
Indifference Is Winning the Battle
Asked about her reaction on seeing the president, Biden returned to a line she repeats often: the opposite of love is not hate, but indifference, and anyone who reaches indifference has won the battle. Getting there has taken very hard effort on her part, she said.
Hate carries a negative, time-consuming and toxic charge, she said, and it eats at a person. What gets her through is telling herself the situation will end and is not forever, and refusing to let one person ruin the joy in her life. That, she said, is the point where she feels she has it conquered.
She Has Never Told Her Husband
Biden never, ever tells anyone who she voted for — not her husband, and not even when he asks. Her ballot has stayed a mystery to Joe Biden, she said, who has never known whether she voted for him.
She hopes U.S. elections are fair, she said, because giving up on what she believed the country to be is not something she can do. Most Americans are proud of their country, she said, and she counts herself a proud American too.
Voters have to believe their ballots matter, she said, whether cast by mail or at a polling place, and deciding that it is all rigged is a place you cannot even let your head go. She added a qualifier: you see things, and you do question. She said she has asked herself how it happened, pointing to all the states that had been blue states, and has no answers for that.
A third term for Trump drew a flat no from Biden, who then asked whether it isn’t in the Constitution. Under the 22nd Amendment, no person can be elected president more than twice. She had no thoughts on Vice President JD Vance or Secretary of State Marco Rubio, giving as her reason that she is not going to be voting for them anyway.
She said there probably should be an age limit for elected officials. She has never thought about where the cutoff belongs, and guessed somewhere in the 80s.
The last question asked when the first woman would win the White House. “Not in my lifetime,” she told Kern Lima, framing the answer around her own age: she is 75, and does not know how it looks across the next 15 or 20 years she hopes to have.