Jill Biden on that disastrous debate and Joe's decision to withdraw

Jill Biden knew something was going disastrously wrong as she watched Joe Biden struggle in the presidential debate that would abruptly end his political career.

"Is this a stroke?" she wondered, watching the TV in a holding room near the CNN studio where President Biden was facing Donald Trump in June 2024. "It felt like we were watching an AI hologram of the man we knew, and the hologram was glitching. Has he been drugged?"

Even two years later, Jill Biden isn't sure what happened that night. Maybe he was overcoached and clutched, she writes in a memoir of her time as first lady, "View from the East Wing," being published June 2 by Gallery Books. Maybe he had been given Ambien or codeine cough syrup for a persistent cough as he flew home from Europe and was feeling side effects.

Never mind that he began to rally soon after the debate was over. It was already too late. "Can Joe Biden survive?" a USA TODAY analysis asked. The reassurances by his spouse and his aides denying that the 81-year-old president was suffering from cognitive decline wouldn't be enough.

"In that debate, Joe lost himself," she writes, no sugarcoating now in her description of her husband's halting performance. "He lost the essence of who he was. He did not speak from the heart. His opponent lied more than a hundred times, but that didn't matter."

As they walked off the set that night, Joe Biden whispered, "I really f---ed up, didn't I?"

"Yes, you did," his wife of 47 years whispered back.

To be clear, that wasn't the message they delivered that night. Then, sugarcoating was the reflexive response. "You did such a great job," she told him before a crowd of supporters. "You answered every question."

But three weeks later, amid pressure from Democratic elders, Biden reluctantly bowed to political reality and announced he was withdrawing from the presidential race with just 107 days to go before Election Day.

That step wouldn't protect him from being blamed for Trump's victory and the Democratic Party's straits.

'Not performing as well'

Yes, Jill Biden acknowledges, her husband had gotten older and tired more easily than before. "The truth was that he was not performing as well as he had in his younger days," she writes. "Did that disqualify him from being president, as long as he was getting the job done?" She didn't think so, and, she says, neither did his top aides or his doctors.

Indeed, she urged him to take a cognitive test to prove the point, an idea dismissed by his advisers.

"They argued to him that every day on the job was a cognitive test, and that it was absurd for people to think that an ability to count backward by threes or whatever the test required would satisfy anyone if his track record didn't."

Questions already had been circulating about his shuffling gait and his careful schedule, including his general reluctance to hold news conferences and sit for interviews with reporters.

Jill Biden does leave the door open that the naysayers might have been right.

"Had he grown too old for the job and I hadn't noticed?" she writes. "I didn't think so, but could I be objective enough to be sure?"

The conspiracy theories about his state of mind would ensnare her, too.

There were critics who accused her of being "some sort of puppet master" − that is, the person secretly running things in the White House. But there were also those who argued she had a responsibility to have told her husband not to run for president in 2024, or to have urged him drop out as the furor raged.

That wasn't how she had ever seen her role, she says.

Their original discussion of whether he should run for the White House in 2020 consumed all of a minute over an impromptu lunch after they had attended the funeral for former President George H.W. Bush in December 2018.

"Before I even looked at the menu, I said: 'This is it, Joe. You have to make up your mind. Are you going to run or not?'

"'Yes, I want to run,' he told me matter-of-factly."

"Okay," she said.

Nearly six years later, she described her role as similarly limited when the question was whether he would pull out. She says she refused to even answer his question about her view, offering her support with whatever decision he made.

That constrained portrayal of her is at odds with her reputation as first lady as a fierce protector of her husband and a keeper of family scores.

She says the decisive moment for Biden came when aide Steve Ricchetti told him a group of senators was said to be preparing a letter telling him it was time to go.

"The Senate had always been the institution that he revered above all others," she says, a place where he had served for 36 years. "Getting that letter might have actually killed him; he'd have died from a broken heart."

Kamala Harris' push for a quick endorsement

When he called then-Vice President Kamala Harris to tell her of his decision, she first expressed concern. "Oh my God, Joe. Are you sure?" she asked. The Bidens were at their beach home in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, his phone on speaker.

Then Harris switched into what Jill Biden called "her courtroom prosecutor mode" and began pushing him to immediately announce his endorsement of her to replace him on the Democratic ticket.

When he suggested waiting until the next morning, she warned that any delay would be an opening for "mischief" − that is, by Democrats who might be interested in backing someone other than her.

"I want it sooner," she said.

""I'll call you back when I figure this out," Joe said.

"Could you do it soon?" she replied. "Say, in twenty minutes?"

At that point, Jill Biden says, she walked out of the room.

Her memoir settles a few scores, generally with a stiletto rather than a hatchet.

There were the longtime Democratic allies who became fair-weather friends. The White House doctors who somehow failed to diagnose Joe Biden's prostate cancer before it had metastasized to his bones.

And Melania Trump.

Jill Biden notes without comment that in 2021, Melania Trump had not followed the custom of the outgoing first lady inviting the incoming one to tea, a chance to see her new home. In 2024, when their positions were reversed, Biden extended that invitation and Melania declined.

Biden followed another tradition: handwriting a formal letter for her successor wishing her well and leaving it on the first lady's desk. On her final moments in the White House, she says, she also wrote an unofficial message with her fingertip on a window that was coated with steam on a frosty morning.

Just what the message was, and whether it was ever visible to anyone else's eyes, isn't clear.

Making peace with Nancy Pelosi

"View from the East Wing" features some of the standard stuff of first lady memoirs. It chronicles the rigors of campaigning and the scrutiny of wardrobes, the glamour of state dinners and the demands of foreign trips. She describes her commitment to continue her job − as an English professor at Northern Virginia Community College − something no other first lady had done.

There are other, less traditional notes, too. She details eight crushing days in June 2024 when she attended son Hunter's trial in Wilmington on gun charges related to his drug addiction while she also made an official visit to France and headlined campaign events in Pennsylvania.

"You can shower at the airport," Anthony Bernal, her chief of staff, advised.

In the 275-page book, the word "Trump" appears only twice, once in a reference to "the Trumps" attending Bush's funeral and once in a quote by Joachim Sauer, the husband of then-German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

In every other reference, Biden's predecessor and successor, his political nemesis, is described simply as the "opponent" and then "the new president."

The book ends with a moment of reconciliation.

A year after leaving the White House, the Bidens attended the funeral in New York of Tatiana Schlossberg, the daughter of Caroline Kennedy and Ed Schlossberg, who died at age 35 of a rare and aggressive form of leukemia.

During the service, the priest encouraged members of the congregation to share the sign of peace.

Two pews behind the Bidens was former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who had held a difficult meeting with the president when he was weighing whether to withdraw. It was his decision, she reportedly told him, but she believed he should drop out. "She said Joe would be heartbroken if he heard what the Democrats were saying about him," Jill Biden writes.

They had never spoken since that day. Now he walked back to where she was seated and held out his hand.

Peace. Let's be friends.

They embraced. For them, at least, the past was past.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Jill Biden on that disastrous debate and Joe's decision to withdraw

Reporting by Susan Page, USA TODAY / USA TODAY

USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect

Copyright Reuters or USA Today Network via Reuters Connect

This story was originally published May 29, 2026 at 12:50 PM.