WASHINGTON (AP) — In her new memoir, former first lady Jill Biden reflects on former President Joe Biden's poor debate performance against Donald Trump nearly two years ago and wonders whether it would have been better to acknowledge it rather than reassure supporters afterward.
The Democrat's performance ultimately proved to be his undoing as he campaigned for reelection by amplifying concerns about whether the then-81-year-old could serve a second term. He ultimately dropped his bid under pressure from within his party and endorsed his vice president, Kamala Harris, who lost to the Republican Trump.
In “View from the East Wing,” a memoir about her White House years that's being published next Tuesday, she said she still doesn’t know why her husband performed so disastrously that day.
The Associated Press obtained a copy of the book's 274-page manuscript, which includes her first public comments about the debate and the ensuing chain of events that sent Joe Biden back to private life in Delaware sooner than he had envisioned.
The book also covers his prostate cancer diagnosis after leaving office and their son Hunter's federal trial on gun charges, among other issues during Joe Biden's term, along with how she juggled the added responsibilities of being first lady with her teaching career.
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.
