“I believe he would have beat Donald Trump in that election,” said former First Lady Jill Biden in an interview this week with Morning Joe on MS NOW of her husband, former President Joe Biden.
Her comment comes after the publication of a book (“Original Sin: President Biden's Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again” from CNN journalists Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson) that claimed that the president’s team hid his health issues from the public during his term. It also comes after former Vice President Kamala Harris criticized the former president’s decision to run in 2024 and Jill Biden’s recent revelation about her husband in her new book.
This memoir, “View from the East Wing”, was published this week, and Jill has promoted it in multiple interviews. During a Sunday interview, she told CBS News Sunday Morning’s Rita Braver that she was concerned that her husband had a stroke as he struggled during a debate with current President Donald Trump in summer 2024.
Joe Biden’s Performance during the debate triggered concerns among the Democratic party, and he eventually dropped out of the race. Harris was then left to run one of the shortest presidential campaigns in history, and she lost to Trump in November 2024.
Last year, Harris revealed in her own memoir, “107 Days” that she believed Joe’s decision to run again was “reckless,” and indicated that it was a decision that Joe and Jill made.
When asked about it on Morning Joe, Jill said: “I guess I was a little surprised that she wrote that,” of Harris’ comments. She also said that she and Joe worked to support Harris’ campaign after Biden dropped out of the race and that Biden’s are still in contact with her.
“I truly believed she was going to win,” said Jill of Harris’ campaign. She said she was shocked to find out that Trump had won the morning after the election.
Jill also denied that Biden’s team “protected him” from public scrutiny. She noted that his team actually requested that fateful 2024 debate with Trump.
After his shaky performance – Jill said that Biden immediately acknowledged that it hadn’t gone well – she said a “team of doctors” that was around them checked the former president out and said he was fine. He went on to do three more events that evening, Jill added.
She said she believed her husband would have won if he had stayed in the race, telling Morning Joe that polls showed he was the only candidate who could beat Trump. However, Gallup polling from the time showed that Biden’s approval rating had sunk to a low of 36% before he announced he would withdraw from the race in July 2024.
Even before the debate, there were concerns about Biden’s age going into a second term – he was already in his 80s during the 2024 election. Jill said her husband shared those concerns, but was encouraged to run again due to positive feedback about his presidency and the Democrats’ surprisingly strong showing in the 2022 midterms.
Jill said her husband’s exit from the race was hard on their family. His son, Hunter Biden, has said that Democrats lost the election because they weren’t loyal to his father. Joe pardoned Hunter after losing the election, though he had said before that he did not plan to pardon him.
While Jill believes that Joe would have won the election back in 2024, she wasn’t as definite about what would have happened afterwards. He was diagnosed with metastatic prostate cancer last May and it has spread to his bones.
“I don’t know. I don’t know the answer to that,” said Jill when asked if he would have been able to serve as president if elected.
Jill also said that the former president is “doing okay,” despite the cancer and that he is still able to give speeches. Near the end of this term, he told Democratic governors that he needed more sleep, but Jill said doctors didn’t identify the cancer until after he was out of office, indicating that was in part because he did not have prostate specific antigen (PSA) testing.
