Dr. Jill Biden called out the “so-called friends” who dubbed her “Lady McBiden” during her husband’s last months in White House.
The former first lady said the comments—which included Alexandra Pelosi’s likening her to Lady Macbeth—were “very hurtful” during her and Joe Biden’s appearance on The View Thursday.
“I did not create a cocoon around him,” Biden said, defending herself from reports that she had “sequestered” the president to hide his mental decline ahead of the 2024 election. “I mean, you saw him in the Oval Office, you saw him making speeches. He wasn’t hiding somewhere, I didn’t have him, you know, sequestered in some place.”
The January report argues the exact opposite, and was bolstered by the Speaker’s daughter blasting of the former first lady. “If I was Lady McBiden, I’d put on my big girl pants, play the long game, and think about my husband’s legacy,” Pelosi told Politico. “There aren’t that many people left in America who have something nice to say about Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi is one of them.”
Though Alexandra Pelosi told the site she was speaking only for herself, the comments strained an already weakened relationship between the Bidens and Pelosis, stemming from the Speaker’s ousting the president to make way for Kamala Harris to run.
The View co-host Sara Haines asked Dr. Biden Thursday if she thinks she was “too close to the situation to objectively gauge whether he could handle a full four more years.”
Biden was adamant that was not the case. “I was with Joe day and night,” she said. “I saw him more than any other person. I woke up with him, I went to bed at night with him, so I saw him all throughout the day,” she continued, so she was confident in his mental ability to do the job. Whoopi Goldberg jumped in to co-sign Biden’s comment at the end of the segment, adding, “The only people that were saying” Biden’s mental acuity wasn’t there were “people who peripherally are standing out here.”
Doubts about Biden being publicly co-signed by Nancy Pelosi’s daughter was another example of the crumbling relationship Dr. Biden called “disappointing” in The Washington Post in January. “We were friends for 50 years,” Dr. Biden also said then.
President Biden, for his part on Thursday, joked that he “wished” his wife had sequestered him as Pelosi and others suggested. During the Thursday appearance, he also discussed Harris’ loss to Donald Trump, telling the hosts he was not “surprised” at the outcome.
“Not because I didn’t think the vice president was the most qualified person to be president—she is,” he explained. “I wasn’t surprised because they went the route of, the sexist route. I’d never seen quite as successful and consistent a campaign undercutting the notion that a woman couldn’t lead the country—and, a woman of mixed race.”
He concluded, “They played that fairly well.”
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