Jill Biden feared her husband had been drugged as he melted down on stage during his disastrous debate against Donald Trump.
The former first lady, 74, watched in horror as Joe Biden, 83, stumbled over his words, terrified that voters would conclude this was how he always was, she reveals in a bombshell new memoir.
‘Is this a stroke? I felt like we were watching an AI hologram of the man we knew, and the hologram was glitching. Has he been drugged?’ Jill writes in View From the East Wing.
She remembers thinking: ‘Oh God – will people watching assume this is how he is all the time?’
Biden appeared frail and repeatedly lost his train of thought as he slurred his way through the infamous June 2024 clash with Trump, a watershed moment that triggered Democratic allies to openly question his fitness for office.
It wasn’t just his supporters who saw disaster: Joe himself admitted he’d suffered a primetime car crash in front of the voting public, Jill reveals.
As Biden walked off stage, he confessed to her: ‘I really f***ed up, didn’t I?’
‘”Yes, you did,” I whispered back,’ Jill writes.
Jill Biden has revealed her horror at Joe Biden’s 2024 debate meltdown in her new memoir
Biden stumbled over his words during the presidential debate against Donald Trump in Atlanta, Georgia, in June 2024
Jill devotes much of the book to the political liability of Biden’s drug addict son Hunter, right
The former first lady was one of Biden’s closest confidantes and a driving force behind his 2024 reelection bid.
She fiercely advocated for him to stay in the race after the debate and had a tense relationship with his ultimate successor for the Democratic candidacy, Kamala Harris.
‘You did such a great job, you answered every question, you knew all the facts,’ Jill told her husband on stage when they joined supporters after the debate.
But just weeks later Biden was forced to drop out.
Jill says she was compelled to write the memoir to ‘set the record straight’ after months of speculation that she masterminded a conspiracy to conceal her husband’s deteriorating health from the public.
But the memoir does little to dispel the rumors, and instead of delivering a tell-all, the former first lady devotes much of the book to the political liability of Joe’s drug addict son Hunter, and the difficulties of navigating White House politics inside the East Wing.
She describes being caught in a ‘catch-22′ as a first lady, where appearing ignorant can be an ’embarrassment,’ while being too knowledgeable can create the perception of a president’s spouse who is ambitious for power.
She largely avoids attacks on allies, including Kamala Harris.
Jill had a tense relationship with her husband’s ultimate successor for the Democratic candidacy, Kamala Harris
Jill admits that a ‘thought bubble above my head was full of expletives’ after Harris attacked her husband over school busing during the June 2019 debate.
But by 2024, the then-first lady and vice president had made peace and were declaring their ‘love’ for each other.
The memoir does not dedicate many pages to the current president, but mourns Trump’s demolition of the East Wing, comparing it to the slaughter of a ‘rare and precious animal.’
She admits that Joe ‘was definitely aging’ while in office, but strenuously denies that he was going senile or showing signs of dementia.
‘The truth was, Joe was not who he was on a day-to-day basis in that debate,’ she writes.
‘Nothing explained what I was seeing’, Jill says in the book. ‘To this day, I still don’t know what happened. Why wasn’t he making any sense? It was inexplicable to me.’
She says that she wondered if he had been over-rehearsed, traveled too much, suffering from illness, or perhaps even mistakenly ingested codeine or Ambien.
‘I only wish I had the answer,’ Jill writes.
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Biden became the first incumbent president to abandon a re-election bid since Lyndon B Johnson in 1968.
He faced widespread criticism for not stepping aside sooner, once it became clear he was not capable of running for a second term.
When he finally withdrew, Biden endorsed Harris on the spot, effectively shutting the door on an open Democratic primary.
A bombshell Democratic autopsy last week laid bare how the White House lavished polling and strategy on Jill while leaving Harris so neglected that aides had no research ready when she was thrust onto the ticket.
The 192-page dossier, commissioned by the DNC and written by veteran strategist Paul Rivera, found the Biden team ordered extensive polling on how ‘Dr Jill’ could prop up her husband’s presidency but never positioned its own VP to face Trump.
Rivera branded the failure a ‘massive missed opportunity,’ noting pollsters were left scrambling to field three emergency studies the moment Biden quit in July 2024.
The report was published with heavy DNC annotations disputing many of its claims, according to CNN, which first ran it.
