WASHINGTON – In her latest memoir, former First Lady Jill Biden delves into her husband, Joe Biden’s, lackluster debate performance against Donald Trump nearly two years ago. She contemplates whether it might have been wiser to acknowledge the shortcomings rather than trying to soothe their supporters afterward.
This debate performance became a pivotal moment, ultimately impacting Joe Biden’s reelection campaign. Concerns about his capability to serve another term were amplified, especially given his age of 81. Facing mounting pressure from within the Democratic Party, he eventually withdrew from the race, endorsing his Vice President, Kamala Harris, who was later defeated by Trump in the election.
In her memoir, “View from the East Wing,” set for release next Tuesday, Jill Biden candidly admits her ongoing puzzlement over her husband’s dismal performance that day. The book offers insight into her reflections on this public setback and the subsequent events that led to Joe Biden’s premature return to their private life in Delaware.
The Associated Press had access to the 274-page manuscript, which marks Jill Biden’s first public commentary on the debate and its ramifications. Her memoir also touches on significant events during Joe Biden’s term, including his prostate cancer diagnosis following his presidency and their son Hunter’s federal trial on gun charges, while highlighting her balancing act as First Lady and educator.
Jill describes Joe Biden as appearing “bleary” in their Atlanta hotel suite before the debate, despite her belief that he would excel due to his usual vigor during major events. However, as the CNN-hosted debate unfolded, she quickly realized something was amiss, noticing that Joe didn’t seem himself right from the start.
Jill Biden writes that her husband “looked bleary” in their hotel suite in Atlanta before the debate. She was confident he would do well, she said, because big events energized him. But when the CNN-sponsored event began, “I immediately noticed that Joe didn’t look good. He didn’t seem himself from the opening.”
A few minutes in, he said something out of turn about “we finally beat Medicare.”
“Is he short-circuiting? I thought,” she wrote. “Is this a stroke? It felt like we were watching an AI hologram of the man we knew, and the hologram was glitching.”
She wondered if he had been drugged or was experiencing a medical emergency.
He improved as the debate went on, “but not enough to reassure me or anyone watching that he was okay. He clearly wasn’t,” Jill Biden said. “I’d never seen that look on his face before in my life.”
As they walked off stage afterward, he used colorful language to whisper to her that he had messed up, which she took as a “sign of his having returned to himself.”
But “to this day, I still don’t know what happened,” she wrote. They attended a post-debate rally and dropped in at a Waffle House before traveling to North Carolina for a next-day appearance.
The official explanation at the time from the White House and others close to the president was that he was suffering from a cold. But Jill Biden said she wonders if they should have acknowledged what millions of people saw — “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 wrote. “There was never a satisfying enough explanation offered for Joe’s debate performance, and a lot of people never got over it.”
Biden’s performance in the debate crystallized the concerns of many voters that he was too old to continue serving as president. It sparked a fresh round of calls for him to consider stepping aside as the party’s nominee as fellow Democrats feared a Trump return to the White House if Biden remained as their candidate.
The drumbeat of calls for him to leave the race started before the debate had ended and, “in the days to come, it would grow louder and louder,” Jill Biden wrote.
