Trump told reporters on Tuesday that the note was “very nice.”

“I could show it because I think it was a nice letter,” the president said. “It was a little bit of an inspirational type of letter. Enjoy it, do a good job. Important, very important. How important the job is.”

“It was a positive, for him, in writing it,” Trump continued. “I appreciated the letter.”

It is a White House tradition set by former President Ronald Reagan for outgoing presidents to leave their successor a letter in the Oval Office. 

Trump had a fun moment discovering Biden’s letter on Monday as he sat at his desk in the Oval Office. As the cameras rolled during live press coverage of Trump’s first few hours as the country’s 47th president, a reporter asked him if Biden had left a parting note. 

“He may have. Don’t they leave it in the desk? I don’t know,” Trump responded before opening the top drawer of the Oval Office’s Resolute desk and discovering a white envelope with the number “47” written on it.

 “Thank you, Peter. It could have been years before we found this thing,” he joked. 

After he finished his first term in office in 2021, Trump left Biden a “generous” parting letter, even though the two men publicly disagreed over whether the 2020 election was “rigged.”

“Because it was private, I won’t talk about it until I talk to him. But it was generous,” Biden told reporters.