Jill Biden isn’t the doctor her husband’s legacy ordered

The audience and hosts erupted in laughter. Jill Biden holds a Doctor of Education degree in educational leadership from the University of Delaware, which she received during her husband’s final term in the Senate.

But Joe Biden’s condition as president wasn’t always a laughing matter, as Jill herself acknowledged during a previous interview that she thought he might have been having a stroke during his disastrous debate with President Donald Trump.

That debate ended Biden’s reelection campaign, but his family and closest advisers resisted fellow Democrats’ initial attempts to nudge him from the top of the ticket.

Chief among them was Jill Biden, who in real time defended her husband’s debate performance even though she acknowledged in her book and subsequent promotional interviews that they knew how badly it went. She still insists he could have won the election.

In the mostly softball interviews for her memoir, Jill Biden has repeatedly been asked why she did so.

“And in the days and weeks after that, you continued to insist that the president was fine,” Craig Melvin of NBC’s Today pressed. “How — how do you square thinking that he may have had a stroke with what you were saying in the days and weeks after? How do you square those two?”

“I know we’re going into another event, or we have two more to do, and I’m, my mind is racing,” Jill Biden said. “What do I say to him? What do I say to him? I’m his wife, I’ve got to lift him up. So, we go to the next event and I’m thinking, ‘What do I say that will lift him up that is true?’ I want to say the things that are true. And so I said, you know, ‘You answered every question.’”

“That’s a pretty low bar,” Melvin shot back.

She later added, “I mean, I’m his wife. I’m not going to get out on the stage there and say, ‘Joe, you really screwed that up.’”

Since losing the 2024 election, Democrats have been vexed by the octogenarian former president’s decision to run for reelection, his reluctance to stand down after a debate performance so poor that it raised questions within his own party about his fitness for office, and leaving former Vice President Kamala Harris just 107 days, which became the title of her memoir, to campaign as his replacement. 

This triggered a wider discussion of whether Biden was really up to the job of being president while he was serving, much less until he would have been 86 years old at the end of a second term, and how much of the media missed that story at the time.

The media has been less forgiving of Jill Biden as she relives that experience in her book and generates off-message headlines during what is expected to be a good midterm election year for Democrats. 

“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,” CNN’s Jake Tapper wrote in a scathing review. “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.”

Whether Jill Biden enabled her husband has been the subtext of the tough questions she has faced on the interview circuit, though she has repeatedly maintained it was her husband’s decision to run again. Her answers have seldom reassured critics. She has been unable to convincingly answer questions about how he would have handled meetings with foreign leaders or a second term, often repeating that the medical consensus was that he was in good enough shape in the summer of 2024.

No answer has been more devastating than her “stroke” comment.

“I don’t know what happened,” she told CBS News Sunday Morning last month. “As I watched it, I thought, ‘Oh, my God, he’s having a stroke.’ And it scared me to death.” She later disclosed to NPR that her husband was “checked” by doctors afterward.

“We got off the stage,” Jill Biden said. “I went to get my stuff. He went with his group, and then we met up in the car, and then the doctors, you know, checked him out and said, ‘Oh, he’s fine.”’

BIDEN JUST WON’T GO AWAY 

All this raises the question of why there was even any discussion of Biden continuing his reelection campaign after the fact.

This is the Democrats’ real 2024 autopsy. Its central finding is that Jill Biden wasn’t the doctor her husband needed at the time.