A legend in Washington, D.C. social circles has accused Jill Biden of “elder abuse,” partly blaming the former first lady for President Donald Trump‘s sweeping election win last fall.
Journalist Sally Quinn—widow of Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee, who directed the paper’s Watergate coverage—slammed Jill for not advising against President Joe Biden‘s re-election bid.
Given Biden’s public mental lapses, especially during his disastrous debate against Trump, Quinn said in a Wednesday interview that the former first lady should have shut down Biden’s idea to spend four more years in the White House.
“I felt sorry for Joe Biden because I didn’t think she was protecting him,” Quin told the Tara Palmeri Show. “She wasn’t protecting him from himself. And after that hideous debate, right after the debate, they’re in the spin room, and she’s got his hand up and they’re going, ‘Victory, victory, we won, we won. It was great, great.’ The next day, he’s up in North Carolina and making a victory speech. I thought, what were they watching?”
She added, “I thought it was just elder abuse, really.”
Quinn, 83, said that Biden, 82, appeared to show the same signs of dementia that Bradlee suffered before his death in 2014 at age 93. Quinn said she knew when to call off certain events out of protection for her husband’s deteriorating mental capacity.
“I would see him, he’d be making a speech, and he’d forget where he was and he would stumble,” she said of Bradlee. “And I finally just said, ‘No, we’re, no more speeches.’ I told everybody in his office, ‘No more speeches, no more public appearances. That’s not happening.’ I just wanted to protect him from himself, to protect his dignity.”
Quinn’s comments come following renewed scrutiny over the former first couple’s last years in the White House incited by excerpts taken from the explosive Original Sin. The explosive book, written by CNN’s Jake Tapper and journalist Alex Thompson, piled on to reports over Biden’s alleged cognitive decline in the latter half of his presidency.
Quinn is known for hosting parties that draw some of Washington’s biggest names, making her one of the capital’s most plugged-in insiders. She told Palmeri that all the talk behind closed doors last summer was about getting Biden not to run again.
“That’s all anybody was talking about because everybody was so desperate,” she said. “How do we get Biden out of there? How do we get him not to run?”
Quinn was so passionate about this, she even wrote a “story for Jill Biden” that was published by the Post after the doomed Biden debate that urged them to call it quits.
“I don’t pretend to know what ails Joe Biden,” she wrote last summer. “I do know what it is like to walk the hard road of age with someone you love.”
On Sunday, Biden announced that he is battling prostate cancer that has spread to his bones. His office said he was diagnosed after a small nodule was found in his prostate during a routine physical exam this month. Quinn said that the disease flying under the radar for so long was both unacceptable and shocking, given the resources afforded to a sitting U.S. president.
Although Quinn seemed to lay the Democrats’ election loss at Jill’s feet, she did not absolve Biden of guilt altogether.
“It was just, I think, unpatriotic of him to run, and unpatriotic of his staff to insist that he run, to support it,” she said.
Quinn added, “I think everybody was horrified that he was put in a position where he was allowed to run by the staff and by his wife, and people felt sorry for him, but it was still his egotistical decision to stay in office, and look what happened.”
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