President Joe Biden on Wednesday donned a Trump hat in what the White House described as a good-natured gesture of bipartisan unity during the anniversary of the September 11 attacks – a light-hearted moment in what has otherwise been an extremely toxic political campaign.
The interaction took place at a firehouse near Shanksville, Pennsylvania, where United Flight 93 crashed into a rural field after passengers tried thwarting its hijacking 23 years ago.
Video of the interaction shows Biden glad-handing with people inside the firehouse, including a man in a Trump hat. Biden hands the man a presidential hat, and the man asks him to autograph it.
“Do you remember your name?” the man jokingly asks the president. Biden responds as an aide hands him a Sharpie: “I don’t remember my name. I’m slow.”
“You’re an old fart,” the man says. “Yeah, I know, I’m an old guy,” Biden responds. “I know you would know about that.” Both men laugh, as does the gathered crowd. The video shows several children in the background wearing Trump-branded shirts.
Biden signs the presidential hat and tells the man he needs his Trump cap. The man obliges and asks the president if he would like his autograph. Biden responds: “Hell no.”
The crowd urges the president to put the Trump hat on over a Shanksville Volunteer Fire Co. Station 627 cap he’s already wearing. The president initially says, “I ain’t going that far,” before obliging the crowd’s requests to laughter and applause.
“I’m proud of you now,” the man says while shaking Biden’s hand. Biden tells the crowd: “Just remember, no eating dogs and cats,” an apparent reference to a false rumor the Trump campaign, former President Donald Trump and Republican vice presidential nominee Sen. JD Vance have promoted about Haitian immigrants in Ohio. Groans are audible in the background at that line.
Biden walks away, still holding the Trump hat. The person who posted the video said in a TikTok comment that the president kept the hat. Efforts to reach the poster and the man in the video were not immediately successful Thursday.
It was one one of the few times since becoming president that Biden has interacted and bantered with a crowd of mainly Trump supporters; the bulk of his public appearances have involved well-heeled Democratic donors or staunch supporters of the president and his policies. It was the kind of retail politics that the president has made his signature throughout his long career.
“At the Shanksville Fire Station, @POTUS spoke about the country’s bipartisan unity after 9/11 and said we needed to get back to that,” White House spokesperson Andrew Bates said in a post on X. “As a gesture, he gave a hat to a Trump supporter who then said that in the same spirit, POTUS should put on his Trump cap. He briefly wore it.”
Trump’s campaign tried capitalizing on the moment, thanking Biden for his support in a social media post.
It wasn’t the only interaction that day that showed a sign of cordialness as the nation remembered a tragic day. Earlier Wednesday, Vice President Kamala Harris and Trump briefly shook hands at a commemoration at Ground Zero in Manhattan.
It came the day after Trump and Harris faced off on the debate stage in Philadelphia. During that debate, Trump said he considered sending Harris one of his hats because he claimed she has copied many of his policies.
“Everything that she believed three years ago and four years ago is out the window. She’s going to my philosophy now. In fact, I was going to send her a MAGA hat,” Trump said.
