Jill Biden’s new claim that she feared Joe Biden was having a “stroke” during the 2024 debate is reigniting questions about what Democrats knew and when.
CNN host Abby Phillip focused on that issue during “Newsnight” after a preview of Jill Biden’s CBS News Sunday Morning interview with Rita Braver showed the former first lady describing fear over her husband’s condition that night.
The problem, Phillip noted, was what Jill Biden did immediately afterward.
At a post-debate event in Georgia, Jill Biden offered her husband an on-stage review that sounded nothing like panic.
“Joe, you did such a great job. You answered every question. You knew all the facts,” she said at the time.
The former first lady’s statement after Biden’s disastrous debate performance became the center of Phillip’s criticism.
“That interview comes just weeks before the release of the former first lady’s new memoir, and it’s the first time that we’ve heard her express any concern about that debate that ultimately ended Joe Biden’s 2024 campaign,” Phillip commented.
“But that stands in stark contrast to what Jill Biden had to say just moments after the debate,” she pointed out.
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After the old clip played, Phillip said Jill Biden’s new explanation raised a much larger issue than one bad night onstage.
“I appreciate that we now get to see at least some version of a truth that she’s putting out there, because I think, yeah, the conversation should be had about the deceptiveness that was behind this,” Phillip said.
“Like that’s the conversation that I think ought to be had,” she added.
Then Phillip turned the accusation outward, questioning the political machinery around Biden.
“What kind of political system covers that up, and makes it OK to lie to people about what everybody knows is true?” she asked.
In the CBS preview, Jill Biden said she still could not explain what she saw during the June 2024 debate against Donald Trump.
“I don’t know what happened [during the debate],” she remarked. “I mean, as I watched it, I thought, “Oh, my God, he’s having a stroke.” And it scared me to death.”
She described the moment as unlike anything she had seen from him before.
“I was frightened,” Jill said during another portion. “Because I had never, ever seen Joe like that. Before or since.”
The reaction to Jill Biden’s bombshell did not stay confined to criticism from cable-news commentators.
Rep. Adam Smith, a Washington Democrat, said on CNN’s “The Arena” that Jill Biden owed the public an apology for the decision to keep pushing her husband’s campaign forward.
“Jill and the family and a whole lot of his advisors around him, for whatever reason, dug in and said, we’re going to jam him forward. And we’ve paid a terrible, terrible price for that,” he commented.
“They just should have seen it, and the only thing I want to hear from Jill Biden is I’m sorry. We should have said something sooner,” he added.
Inside Biden’s own orbit, the former first lady’s interview landed badly.
Alex Thompson, the Axios reporter who co-wrote “Original Sin,” said former Biden administration officials began reaching out after Jill Biden’s interview clip surfaced.
“Well, a lot of Democrats, including several Biden aides that I’ve talked to since yesterday when this interview came out, just simply don’t believe her,” Thompson said during an interview with CNN’s Brianna Keilar.
Their skepticism centered on Jill Biden’s behavior after the debate, when she appeared beside her husband at the post-debate rally and continued with campaign events the next day.
“And a lot of former Biden aides, you know, have told me if you really believed he might be having a stroke, that it’s not necessarily the same behavior that you would do. There’s no evidence that there was any significant medical exam afterward,” Thompson added.
The backlash was not just about the debate performance. It was about whether the people closest to Biden were trying to rewrite the story after the fact.
“And, you know, a lot of Democrats think that this is simply unhelpful to come out at this moment and try to rewrite this portion of history… I have to say that there is a significant skepticism that she is trying to rewrite this narrative right now,” he continued.
“They just feel that the inner circle gaslit them,” Thompson went on. “I’ve been surprised by the level of anger and frustration that I’ve heard from former Biden aides towards the former first lady in the last 24 hours.”
The criticism also came from the right, where Kayleigh McEnany agreed that Jill Biden’s public reaction after the debate did not match her new account of fearing a medical emergency.
“That is not the reaction of someone who believes they just watched their husband have a stroke. It is an absolute lie. It was fraud,” she told co-host Dana Perino on Fox News Channel’s “America’s Newsroom.”
“What she did fraud on the American public and she’s continuing it by saying she had never seen him like that before or after.”
Jill Biden’s CBS interview is set to promote her memoir. The Atlantic obtained a copy of the memoir, which reportedly shows both Bidens understood immediately that the debate had gone badly.
When Biden walked off the stage that night, Jill wrote that he whispered to her, “I really f—ed up, didn’t I?”
“‘Yes, you did,’ I whispered back,” she replied to him.
The memoir also describes Jill Biden trying to make sense of what she had watched onstage.
“Nothing explained what I was seeing,” Jill said about her husband’s debate performance.
“To this day, I still don’t know what happened. Why wasn’t he making any sense? It was inexplicable to me.”
The Atlantic summarized that Jill Biden later wondered whether he may have unknowingly taken codeine cough syrup or Ambien to deal with a cold or help him sleep.
The outlet also reported that she wished she had pushed for a blood test after the debate and wanted him to take a cognitive test to quiet concerns about his mental acuity, but was overruled by his advisors.
Trump blasted the former first lady in a scathing Truth Social post on Friday.
She said that she thought he was having a ‘stroke,’ and various other really bad things, and yet never rushed onto the stage to help her troubled husband, as any good wife would do,” he posted on Truth Social. “The only thing she failed to mention was how well I was doing prior to his near total collapse.”
“In other words, as many have asked, did my strong performance in that debate cause him to plain and simple ‘choke,’ leading to his ignominious defeat, or were other reasons the cause?” Trump added. “Nobody else knows the answer to that, BUT I DO!!!”
