WASHINGTON — The former first lady shares candid reflections about her husband’s challenging debate against Donald Trump in her upcoming memoir, questioning whether being more transparent about his condition might have been the better approach instead of offering reassurance to supporters.
The Democratic candidate’s showing during that debate became a turning point in his reelection campaign, heightening worries about whether the then-81-year-old was capable of serving another four years. Facing mounting pressure from his own party, he eventually withdrew from the race and backed his vice president, Kamala Harris, who ultimately fell to the Republican Trump.
Her memoir “View from the East Wing,” chronicling her White House experience and set for release next Tuesday, reveals she remains puzzled by her husband’s struggles during that crucial evening.
The Associated Press secured an advance copy of the 274-page manuscript, which contains her first public remarks about the debate and the subsequent events that led Joe Biden to return to private life in Delaware earlier than planned.
The memoir also discusses his prostate cancer diagnosis following his departure from office and their son Hunter’s federal gun charges trial, along with other matters from Joe Biden’s presidency and how she balanced first lady duties with her teaching responsibilities.
According to Jill Biden, her husband appeared “bleary” in their Atlanta hotel room before the debate. Despite her confidence that he would perform well since major events typically energized him, she noticed problems immediately when the CNN-hosted event started. “I immediately noticed that Joe didn’t look good. He didn’t seem himself from the opening,” she wrote.
Early in the debate, he made an odd comment about “we finally beat Medicare.”
“Is he short-circuiting? I thought,” she documented. “Is this a stroke? It felt like we were watching an AI hologram of the man we knew, and the hologram was glitching.”
She questioned whether he had been given something harmful or was having a medical crisis.
While he showed improvement as the debate continued, “but not enough to reassure me or anyone watching that he was okay. He clearly wasn’t,” Jill Biden explained. “I’d never seen that look on his face before in my life.”
After leaving the stage, he quietly admitted to her using strong language that he had failed, which she interpreted as “a sign of his having returned to himself.”
“To this day, I still don’t know what happened,” she documented. They participated in a post-debate event and visited a Waffle House before heading to North Carolina for the following day’s scheduled appearance.
While the White House and close associates explained at the time that he was battling a cold, Jill Biden now questions whether they should have been honest about what viewers witnessed — “that he looked very unwell in that debate.”
“The biggest lesson for us, I think, was that if you don’t explain something well enough then the question won’t go away,” she noted. “There was never a satisfying enough explanation offered for Joe’s debate performance, and a lot of people never got over it.”
The debate performance confirmed many voters’ worries that he was too advanced in age to continue as president. It triggered renewed demands for him to step aside as the party’s nominee as fellow Democrats worried about a Trump presidency if Biden stayed in the race.
The calls for his withdrawal began before the debate concluded and, “in the days to come, it would grow louder and louder,” Jill Biden documented.
