Jill Biden Says She Feared Her Husband Was Having a Stroke During Disastrous 2024 Debate Performance

The former first lady, Jill Biden, says she was “frightened” during President Biden’s debate performance against President Trump in 2024 — a performance which would eventually lead him to drop out of the presidential race. She says she feared that her husband may have been having a stroke. In an exclusive interview with “CBS Sunday Morning” to promote her new memoir, Mrs. Biden made her fears known, despite claiming after the debate that Mr. Biden had performed well. “I was frightened because I had never, ever seen Joe like that, before or since. Never,” she said. “I don’t know what happened. I mean, as I watched it I thought, ‘Oh my god, he’s having a stroke.’”“It scared me to death,” she said. Immediately after the debate, however, Mrs. Biden stood on stage with her husband before a crowd of supporters and told the then president that he “did such a great job.”“You answered every question, you knew all the facts, and let me ask the crowd: What did Trump do? Lied!” Mrs. Biden said at the time. Her new book, “View from the East Wing”, which is due to be released next month, recaps her time as the wife of a longtime senator, her role as second lady, and her four years as first lady of the United States. According to the publisher, Simon & Schuster, Mrs. Biden will bring readers, “behind the scenes, from Camp David to Air Force One, from grading papers in the Rose Garden to witnessing the abrupt end of her husband’s bid for reelection.”Despite delivering a number of policy wins for the Democratic Party, Mr. Biden and his family are not held in the highest regard. Ahead of the midterms, Mr. Biden is doing few political events. Recently he endorsed a former aide, Dan Koh, for Congress in Massachusetts, though the endorsement announcement was simply a video of Mr. Biden calling Mr. Koh, rather than an in-person event or fundraiser. Some Democrats were quick to jump on Mrs. Biden’s remarks, given she had been such a strong defender of her husband and major proponent of Mr. Biden staying in the 2024 race. A former chief White House speechwriter for President Obama, Jon Favreau — who was an advocate of pushing Mr. Biden out of the last presidential campaign — wrote on X that Mrs. Biden was now finally saying what the rest of the country already knew. “Those of us who agreed with Jill Biden’s actual assessment (i.e., people who could see and hear) were told by the Bidens and the campaign and the online dead-enders that we were all wildly overreacting and that his debate performance was fine — even good!” Mr. Favreau wrote. The eventual nominee that year, Vice President Kamala Harris, has also publicly spoken out about her frustration with Mr. Biden and his decision to seek a second term. In her own memoir, “107 Days”, Ms. Harris complained that White House staff often sidelined her and handed her odious assignments like immigration. In her book, she called out Mrs. Biden, as well. “‘It’s Joe and Jill’s decision.’ We all said that, like a mantra, as if we’d all been hypnotized,” Ms. Harris wrote. “Was it grace, or was it recklessness? In retrospect, I think it was recklessness.”Though no excerpts of the book have been released thus far, Mrs. Biden is widely expected to talk about her complicated relationship with the Democrats who helped push her husband out of the race, including Speaker Nancy Pelosi. After Mrs. Pelosi helped orchestrate his ouster, she and Mr. Biden did not speak for the remainder of his presidency, despite her being so instrumental during the course of his Washington career. The two were friends for decades, though Mrs. Pelosi recently told MS NOW that she did, in fact, have lunch with the former president after he left the White House. Shortly before the end of her husband’s administration, Mrs. Biden vented about Mrs. Pelosi in an interview with the Washington Post. “It’s been on my mind a lot lately,” she said of her relationship with the former House speaker. “We were friends for 50 years. … It was disappointing.”

Jill Biden Says She Feared Her Husband Was Having a Stroke During Disastrous 2024 Debate Performance

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