As she watched President Biden stumble through the most cringeworthy portion of his disastrous June 2024 debate, First Lady Jill Biden wondered if her husband had unknowingly ingested drugs or was having a medical episode on live television. “Is he short-circuiting?” Jill Biden thought. “Is this a stroke? I felt like we were watching an AI hologram of the man we knew, and the hologram was glitching. Has he been drugged?”
Her mind then wandered to a more personal anxiety, considering how his nonsensical word salads—one of which ended with “we finally beat Medicare”—might implicate her as the person best positioned to know if the man who appeared to disassemble onstage was privately prone to incoherence. “Oh God—will people watching assume this is how he is all the time?” she writes in her new memoir, View From the East Wing, a copy of which The Atlantic obtained ahead of its June 2 release date.
Part of Jill Biden’s goal for writing a book about her four years as first lady, it seems, is to dispel bipartisan accusations that she was a hidden hand covering up her aging husband’s cognitive decline and nudging him to cling to power longer than his mind and body could sustain. As his closest confidant and the person who saw him even when his staff was not around, the former first lady has faced a deluge of conspiracy theories that place her at the center of what critics describe as a grand cover-up. A spokesperson for the Bidens declined to comment.
That Jill Biden felt compelled, in her words, to “set the record straight” highlights how much that presidential debate nearly two years ago—and the ensuing months of political turbulence that led to President Trump’s return to power—continue to reverberate within the Democratic Party. Even as its leaders struggle to find a potent counterattack to Trump’s presidency, this memoir, which resurfaces many moments the party would like to forget, showcases the difficulty Democrats face in closing an embarrassing chapter.
The story of how Biden’s presidency imploded, it seems, is destined to continuously be written and rewritten. View From the East Wing follows books by former Vice President Kamala Harris and Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, each of which shed an unflattering light on the president’s condition as he sought reelection and the chaos that erupted after the debate. Last week, the Democratic National Committee released an autopsy report on the 2024 election, highlighting how Biden’s presidency paved the way to Harris’s doomed 107-day campaign and Trump’s resurgence. Trump seems determined to keep Biden in the news as well, mentioning his predecessor almost daily.
But Biden’s book may not deliver the kind of closure the party has been desperately, and repeatedly, seeking. Rather than offering an explosive political tell-all, the former first lady instead focuses on the nuances of navigating the politics of the White House’s East Wing. She describes struggling with the “catch-22” of being first lady, a position in which knowing too little can make you “an embarrassment” and knowing too much can make you seem power hungry. She largely holds back from lashing out against her foes—including those who abandoned Biden after the debate—though at one point she faults former Attorney General Merrick Garland for his handling of the case that resulted in Hunter Biden’s conviction on gun charges. (The president pardoned his son before leaving the White House.) While she writes that a “thought bubble above my head was full of expletives” after Harris attacked her husband over school busing during a June 2019 debate, by 2024, the first lady and vice president were professing their “love” for each other. The book does not dwell much on the current president, though it laments Trump’s destruction of the East Wing, likening it to the slaughter of a “rare and precious animal.”
Jill Biden concedes that her husband, who turned 80 shortly before announcing his reelection bid, “was definitely aging” in office, occasionally failing in his fight against fatigue and the physical demands of the presidency. He apparently battled “excruciating pain most days” from a November 2020 foot injury that never fully healed. She acknowledges that her husband had “privately floated the idea of voluntarily being a one-term, transitional president” during his 2020 campaign and, deep into his presidency, seriously considered whether pursuing a second term would be the right decision. At one point in January 2023, she writes, she “floated a hypothetical” and wondered if the Republicans would “continue to go after our family if you decided not to run?” (Hunter Biden’s struggle with drug addiction and the political liability it created for his father take up a considerable portion of the book.) But the president did not think that was a good reason to forgo a presidential race, she says.
And besides, the president’s political advisers—and his family members—insisted that he needed to run for reelection, pointing to polling showing him as the most formidable Democrat and laying out the stakes for what might happen if Republicans retook the White House.
But Jill Biden vehemently denies that her husband had been showing any signs of senility or dementia that would have foreshadowed such a painful-to-watch debate performance when he stood on the stage with Trump in Atlanta (“The truth was, Joe was not who he was on a day-to-day basis in that debate,” she writes). So what happened? Even nearly two years later, Jill Biden seems to have more questions than answers.
“Nothing explained what I was seeing,” she writes at one point about her husband’s “strangely monochromatic” visage and lackluster performance. “To this day, I still don’t know what happened. Why wasn’t he making any sense? It was inexplicable to me,” she says elsewhere in the book. Maybe he had rehearsed too much? Maybe he had traveled too much that month? Or was he just ill? The president had seemed exhausted earlier in the day and had told her that he was not feeling too well. Later, after positing that he may have unwittingly taken codeine cough syrup or Ambien to fight off a cold or to help him sleep, Jill Biden seems to rhetorically throw her hands in the air: “I only wish I had the answer.” (You could forgive the reader for wondering, Well, did you ask him?) The first lady writes that she wished she had thought to ask for a blood test after the debate (and also says she suggested the president take a cognitive test to calm doubts, but was overruled by his advisers).
Jill Biden writes that on their bathroom mirror, she would at times leave inspirational messages like “You are my hero” or, on particularly tough days, “Get up, champ. Get up.” Sometimes, she would sneak in messages on policy, relying on her ability to be frank and open with the leader of the free world in ways that others could not. During Israel’s military offensive in Gaza, after an air strike killed seven people working for a humanitarian-aid group, she left a Post-it note on the mirror reading “Net has to stop,” a reference to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Knowing that Biden and Netanyahu would be speaking the following day, she left another note the next morning, which read: “Be strong. Don’t let BN use your goodness.”
That bluntness apparently resurfaced in the moments after the debate. As the president walked off the stage, he whispered to his wife, “I really f**ked up, didn’t I?” she writes. “‘Yes, you did,’ I whispered back.”
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