President Donald Trump has hit out at former first lady Jill Biden after she publicly recalled wondering if her husband, former President Joe Biden, was suffering from a stroke during the disastrous June 2024 debate that led to his exit from that year’s presidential race.
Writing on Truth Social, Trump slammed her for failing to sufficiently praise his debate performance against his successor-turned-predecessor and suggested that his “strong performance in that debate” caused the then-president to “choke” and criticized her for not interrupting the debate to pull him off-stage, “as any good wife would do.”
“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. The only thing she failed to mention was how well I was doing prior to his near total collapse,” he said.
He added: “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? Nobody else knows the answer to that, BUT I DO!!!”
Trump’s comments came just a day after The Atlantic published a story detailing how Biden’s upcoming memoir, View From the East Wing, recounts her reaction during her husband’s meandering, somnolent performance in his sole 2024 presidential debate.
The magazine reported that she wrote about wondering if then-President Biden was “short-circuiting,” if he had been “drugged” or “having a stroke” as he rambled through incoherent word salads in a mumbling near-whisper.
“Nothing explained what I was seeing,” she reportedly wrote at one point.
“To this day, I still don’t know what happened. Why wasn’t he making any sense? It was inexplicable to me,” she wrote later on, adding at yet another point: “I only wish I had the answer.”
She told CBS News in a separate interview that she’d been “frightened” during the debate because she had “never ever seen Joe like that before or since.”
“I don’t know what happened … as I watched it, I thought, ‘Oh, my God, he’s having a stroke.’ And it scared me to death,” she said.
In a separate excerpt published by USA Today, Biden writes that her husband “lost himself” on that Atlanta debate stage.
“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,” she said.
She added that the then-president knew his performance had been a problem because he asked her if he’d “really f****d up” just after walking offstage.
Biden’s memoir and the accompanying publicity tour are already raising hackles among Democrats who are more eager to focus on the midterm elections than to re-litigate the disaster that befell the party in the 2024 election, which many have traced back to Joe Biden’s decision to mount a bid for re-election despite being firmly in his ninth decade — roughly the same age as Trump is now.
