Jill Biden says her final hours in the White House came with an unexpected and emotional scramble to save pieces of her family’s presidential history before Donald Trump returned to power.
The former first lady revealed that shortly before Trump was sworn in as the 47th president in January 2025, she received a startling call warning her that merchandise and keepsakes bearing the Biden name could soon be removed and destroyed.
Speaking with actor Jesse Tyler Ferguson on his Dinner’s On Me podcast, Biden said someone from the State Department contacted her during the closing hours of President Joe Biden’s term and asked whether there was anything she wanted to purchase from White House shelves.
“Somebody from the State Department called me and said, the last hours we’re in the White House, ‘Jill, is there anything you want from the shelves?’” Biden recalled.
She said the shelves included items such as glasses, photographs, vases and other presidential mementos.
According to Biden, the caller began showing her items over the phone and asking what she wanted to keep.
“Do you want this? Do you want this? Do you want this?” Biden recalled being asked.
Then came the warning that caught her off guard.
Biden claimed she was told that anything bearing the Biden name that remained after the family left office would be taken away and “crushed.”
“The next administration coming in is going to crush everything on these shelves,” Biden said she was told.
The former first lady, now 75, made clear the souvenirs weren’t being handed over for free.
She said she had to pay full price for anything she wanted to preserve.
“What do you want to buy? Full price,” Biden recalled, before questioning the way the situation was handled.
“I mean, it’s kind of almost rude and arrogant, right?” she told Ferguson.
Ferguson asked whether the same thing had happened to items associated with Barack Obama when Trump first entered the White House in 2017.
Biden said she didn’t know.
“But they warned me it was happening after ours,” she said.
Faced with the possibility that the memorabilia could disappear forever, Biden decided to act.
“I bought tons of stuff,” she revealed.
She said many of the items have since been given to her children and grandchildren as keepsakes from the family’s four years in the White House.
The conversation also turned to another source of frustration for Biden: strict federal rules governing gifts received from foreign officials.
Biden criticized the rules as “archaic,” describing how even unusual or deeply symbolic gifts can receive surprisingly high government valuations.
She recalled receiving a piece of shrapnel connected to the war in Ukraine and initially believing she could simply keep it as a historical memento.
“I didn’t think anything of it,” Biden said. “I thought, ‘Well, this is kind of interesting. I’ll keep this.’”
But according to Biden, the State Department quickly stepped in.
“Oh, no, you won’t,” she recalled being told.
Biden said officials valued the piece of shrapnel at roughly $20,000.
“I’m like, ‘You’re crazy,’” she said.
Under federal ethics rules, government officials generally face restrictions on personally keeping expensive gifts from foreign governments unless they pay the appraised value.
Biden also used the podcast appearance to take a swipe at her predecessor, Melania Trump, while describing the condition of the East Wing when the Bidens arrived at the White House in 2021.
Without naming Melania directly, Biden said the previous occupant apparently had not used the office as a regular workspace.
“When we moved in there, the previous inhabitant hadn’t used the office to work in,” Biden said. “It was kind of dingy and dull.”
Biden said she immediately decided the space needed a transformation.
“I said, ‘I can’t bring people here,’” she recalled.
She eventually turned to celebrity interior designer Mark Sikes, asking him to create a room that felt polished but still welcoming.
“I want people to come in and feel that it’s elegant, but to feel comfortable, like they can sort of plop on the couch,” Biden said she told him.
Looking back, Biden joked that she wishes she had taken even more with her.
Referring to Trump’s plans for a major White House ballroom project involving the East Wing, Biden said she never imagined the space she worked in could be dramatically altered.
“Had I known that this was going to happen, I would have purchased like everything in that office and taken it with me,” she said.
“But who knew?”
For Biden, what should have been a quiet final goodbye to the White House instead became a last-minute race to preserve pieces of an administration — and a family chapter — that was coming to an abrupt end.
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Late story… Jill Bribery was booted from our White Powder Cocaine House 1 1/2 YEARS ago!
If the stuff was really going to be crushed as garbage, it should have been free… but was more likely going to be auctioned off and she should have bought it at auction… most of it would have gone dirt cheap…