“If you knew Joe Biden well, you’d know that if he actually got to the point where he wasn’t capable of doing the job, he would step down,” former first lady Jill Biden writes in her new memoir “View from the East Wing.” “Certainly, if he exhibited cognitive impairment, I would not hesitate to say so. His staff would not hesitate to say so. But he was nowhere near that point in the summer of 2024.”
All of that is very difficult to believe, if not just downright false.
First of all, this nation’s history is full of examples of politicians who considered themselves selfless and self-aware who refused to give up power, former President Joe Biden just being the most glaring example.
Second, Biden’s closest advisers, nicknamed the Politburo by lower-level Biden aides, are to this day insisting he could have beaten Donald Trump in the 2024 election, and is capable at this very moment of serving as president.
But most glaring in the above paragraph is Jill Biden’s desire to have you believe in her integrity while also subtly — perhaps subconsciously — acknowledging that there’s more going on.
Why the specific assertion that he was “nowhere near that point in the summer of 2024”?
How about the fall of 2024? How about 2025? How about today?
Discussing the admirable ability of her husband to survive any number of horrors life has thrown his way, Jill Biden quotes Ernest Hemingway: “‘The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places.’… I believed that was true of Joe,” she writes. “For all he’d been through, he was stronger.”
It is telling that Mrs. Biden doesn’t include the full Hemingway quote, which is about mortality and the end of life. The full quote, from “A Farewell to Arms,” continues: “But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry.”
The full quote is of course the least of what the first lady leaves out in this book.
After the November 2024 election, Axios reporter Alex Thompson and I spoke with more than 200 Democratic insiders, officials, campaign staff, and more — all of whom supported Biden — to find out how much of what we saw on that debate stage on June 27, 2024, had been seen before that night behind the scenes. The answer was: quite a bit. Our book, “Original Sin,” detailed mental acuity issues that got much more pronounced in 2023 and 2024 but had reared their heads before then. None of them are in her book, of course.
She centers her discussions about her husband’s fitness in a section centered on his decision to run for president in 2020. “To me, Joe was definitely aging, but he was not exhibiting signs of dementia or senility,” she writes. “Joe was the same man I’d always known.”
Again, this comes when discussing him running in 2020. Not 2024.
After that passage, she yada yadas to the 2023 decision to run for reelection. After an anecdote in which a visitor sees Biden — in 2019 or 2020 — “hop(ping) into his green 1967 Corvette Stingray, rev the engine, and screams down the highway” (“That is sure not the guy they portray on television,” the unnamed visitor gushes) — she suddenly hops to 2024:
“Even if he had slowed down in the years before his election bid, I believed in my heart that he was still good enough and wise enough and capable enough to govern,” she writes. “He never wavered from his values, the same ones I grew up with. I believe that if his health had ever deteriorated to the point where he was no longer able to serve, he would have had the humility to admit that.”
There is enough space in between those lines for a 1967 Corvette Stingray to travel.
The issue was never about whether he was good, wise, or had the same values. It was about his ability to run for president, to win the campaign, and to serve as president.
The best she says about that is that he would be “capable enough.”
Capable enough?
Also please note that she leaves the decision about whether he couldn’t do the job entirely up to him. As if a person mentally deteriorating would necessarily be up to that task.
Thus, she stands by her decision: “For the good of the country, I knew that I, for one, would rather Joe have a second term than not.”
Again, that’s not the question.
“Given what terrible things Joe’s opponent guaranteed he would do, the choice seemed clear,” she writes.
But the choice wasn’t Trump vs. Biden. It was Trump vs. which Democrat would be best.
“I felt that Joe was a far, far better option than his opponent — who, by the way, was only three years younger than Joe,” she writes.
It wasn’t about the number.
In her own book, “107 Days,” former Vice President Kamala Harris describes President Biden’s decision to run for reelection this way: “‘It’s Joe and Jill’s decision.’ We all said that, like a mantra, as if we’d all been hypnotized…it was recklessness. The stakes were simply too high. This wasn’t a choice that should have been left to an individual’s ego, an individual’s ambition.”
But as Jill Biden tells it, in 2023, “the best Democratic minds hadn’t thought” anyone else other than Joe Biden could beat Trump and “they implored him to run.”
They did? Who? Which best Democratic minds implored him to run?
The most charitable interpretation of Jill Biden’s book, particularly the parts dealing with her husband’s aging, is that she’s having difficulty accepting what’s been happening to him for years. The less forgiving version is that she’s been enabling it and is now seeking to try to find an excuse for what we all saw, while also suggesting here and there that there’s much more than maybe even she’s willing to admit to herself.
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‘The only thing I want to hear from Jill Biden is I’m sorry’: Top Dem reacts to the former First Lady’s recent comments
Of course she repeats a lot of the same arguments Democrats made before his terrible, troubling performance in the June 2024 debate — and the failure to immediately prove that the debate had been an anomaly — revealed something much worse was going on than had been acknowledged.
She talks about her pitch to voters in February 2024: “at eighty-one, he does more in an hour than most people do in a day.” Well, yes, that’s true of all presidents given the powers and responsibilities of the office. But it doesn’t acknowledge his preferred shortened schedule of 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., whenever possible, or his inability to campaign vigorously.
(In her book, Kamala Harris writes that “his inner circle, the people who knew him best, should have realized that any campaign was a bridge too far, and that in its rigors, he’d be perpetually, increasingly, unavoidably exhausted.”)
Heading into the debate, Mrs. Biden says, “Joe seemed tired — overly tired. He was pushing too hard, traveling too much.” Yes, we know. That’s part of the job of the president of the United States. She repeats that he didn’t feel well. Then comes the debate. And that first, awful answer.
“Is he short-circuiting? I thought. Is this a stroke? It felt like we were watching an AI hologram of the man we knew, and the hologram was glitching. Has he been drugged? Oh God — will people watching assume that this is how he is all the time? … Was he having a medical emergency?”
Then she writes:
“Joe did improve in the course of that debate, but not enough to reassure me or anyone watching that he was okay. He clearly wasn’t. So what was wrong? Nothing explained what I was seeing. I’d never seen that look on his face before in my life.”
And the mystery, for her, continues:
“To this day, I still don’t know what happened. Why wasn’t he making any sense? It was inexplicable to me… Had he taken something on the plane for his cough, something at the hotel to sleep — codeine cough syrup of Ambien? I’d been on the campaign trail and hadn’t been with him, so I had no idea. I only wish I had the answer.”
The book begins with the former first lady faulting the White House physicians for not testing the president in office for the Stage IV cancer that is currently, sadly, wreaking havoc on his body.
“I’m a doctor,” one woman says to the former president in 2025 on a Delaware beach. “How did your doctor not pick up this cancer diagnosis earlier?”
The answer Jill Biden provides — that the American Urological Association doesn’t recommend routine Prostate-Specific Antigen screening for men older than 70, given that life expectancy in the US is 76 — doesn’t really make sense given that Biden turned 76 in 2018, two years before he was elected president, which is, of course, also kind of why he might have been an exception.
The first lady takes the time to consider why her husband didn’t get a PSA test — but still doesn’t seem willing to scrutinize, or be honest about, another health issue that we all saw live on TV on the night of June 27, 2024.