Bidens bring an unexpected piece of furniture to White House

WASHINGTON — There’s a crib in President Joe Biden’s White House.

Upstairs in the family residence, the bed is set for the president’s youngest grandchild, Beau Biden Jr. The baby was born last year to Biden’s only surviving son, Hunter Biden, brother of Beau Biden, the president’s other son, who died of brain cancer in 2015 at age 46.

The baby bed’s addition came to light during a People magazine interview in which the president said the Senate must put former President Donald Trump on trial since the House had impeached him over last month’s riot at the U.S. Capitol, which left five people dead.

“Otherwise it makes a mockery of the system,” Biden said in his first White House interview since his Jan. 20 swearing-in as president.

Biden doubted that enough Republicans — at least 17 are needed — would join Democrats to convict Trump on a charge of inciting his supporters to storm the Capitol on Jan. 6 in an attempt to keep lawmakers from certifying Trump’s election loss to Biden.

A former senator himself, Biden has avoided saying whether he thinks the Senate should convict Trump, but he told People, “I’m not looking for retribution.”

“My job is to try to heal the country and move us forward, because I think we have so many opportunities as a country,” he said in interview excerpts released Wednesday.

Biden also pledged anew that no family member will work in the administration.

“We’re going to run this like the Obama-Biden administration,” he said. “No one in our family and extended family is going to be involved in any government undertaking or foreign policy. And nobody has an office in this place.”

Biden made that pledge during the 2020 presidential campaign — as Trump and other Republicans tried to make an issue out of some of Hunter Biden’s overseas business dealings. He sought to differentiate himself from Trump, whose daughter Ivanka and son-in-law, Jared Kushner, served him as high-level White House advisers.

Biden represented Delaware for 36 years in the Senate. Barack Obama, a senator from Illinois, and Biden were elected president and vice-president, respectively, in 2008.

Biden told the magazine a folksy story about rejecting the advice of an accountant who had told him years ago that he could bill the Senate for some of the gasoline he pumped into the family car.

Biden said he told the accountant: “Here’s how I look at it: The foul line is 15 feet away from the basket. Never get me closer than 17 feet, because it really is a matter of the public trust.”

“And we need to rebuild that trust in government,” added Jill Biden, who joined her husband for the interview in the magazine’s Feb. 15 issue, hitting newsstands nationwide on Friday, days before Trump’s impeachment trial is set to open in the Senate.

Darlene Superville, The Associated Press