In her memoir, Jill Biden thought Joe had a stroke while debating Trump: ‘Is he going to short out?’ | Today’s news

In her new memoir, former first lady Jill Biden reflects on Joe Biden’s widely criticized performance in a debate against U.S. President Donald Trump nearly two years ago, asking whether it might have been better to openly admit how bad it was instead of appeasing supporters afterward, the AP reported.

The debate marked a turning point in Biden’s re-election campaign and heightened doubts about whether the then 81-year-old president was eligible for another term. He eventually withdrew from the race under pressure from within the Democratic Party and endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris, who later lost the election to Donald Trump.

In “View from the East Wing,” a memoir about her years in the White House that comes out next Tuesday, she said she still doesn’t know why her husband behaved so disastrously that day.

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The Associated Press obtained a copy of the 274-page book manuscript, which includes her first public comments about the debate and the ensuing chain of events that sent Joe Biden back into private life in Delaware sooner than he imagined.

The book also discusses Joe Biden’s diagnosis of prostate cancer after leaving office, as well as the federal trial of their son Hunter on gun charges, among other challenges during his presidency. It also highlights how Jill Biden has managed the demands of being first lady alongside her continuing teaching career.

Here are some highlights from the book:

She thought Joe might have a stroke while debating Trump

As reported by the AP, Jill Biden writes that her husband “looked pale” before the debate in their hotel suite in Atlanta. She was sure he would do well, she said, because big events energized him. But when the CNN-sponsored event began, “I noticed right away that Joe didn’t look good. He didn’t look like himself from the start.”

Within minutes, he said something out of turn about how we “finally beat Medicare.”

“Shorting? I thought,” she wrote. “Is it a stroke? It felt like we were watching an AI hologram of a man we knew and the hologram was flashing.”

She wondered if he was drugged or having a medical emergency.

As the debate went on, he got better, “but not enough to reassure me or anyone watching that he was OK. He clearly wasn’t,” Jill Biden said. “I’ve never seen that look on his face in my life.

As they then left the stage, he used colorful language to whisper to her that he messed up, which she took as “a sign that he’s back to himself”.

But “to this day I still don’t know what happened,” she wrote. They attended a post-debate rally and stopped at a Waffle House before heading to North Carolina for a performance the next day.

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The official explanation from the White House at the time and others close to the president was that he was suffering from a cold. But Jill Biden said she questions whether they should have acknowledged what millions of people saw — “that he looked very bad in that debate.”

“I think the biggest lesson for us was that if you don’t explain something well enough, the question doesn’t go away,” she wrote. “A sufficiently satisfactory explanation was never offered for Joe’s performance in the debate, and many people never got over it.”

Biden’s performance in the debate crystallized concerns among many voters that he is too old to continue serving as president. It sparked a new round of calls for him to consider withdrawing as the party’s nominee, as fellow Democrats fear Trump’s return to the White House if Biden remains their nominee, the AP reported.

The drumbeat of calls for him to drop out of the race began before the debate ended and “will get louder and louder in the coming days,” Jill Biden wrote.

Fired from teaching at Northern Virginia Community College

Jill Biden revealed that when she was first lady, she was fired from the school, where she had taught English and writing since 2009. She signed a one-year contract in July 2023 and received a termination letter signed by the college president in the winter.

The grant used to pay her salary has dried up.

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“I felt sick,” she wrote. “I was hosting holiday parties at the White House, so I had to go from emails about my firing to groups of kids blaring ‘Jingle Bells.’

Eventually, the problem was resolved — she didn’t say how — “and I kept my position.”

But she taught the last class at the school in December 2024, ending her 40-year career as an educator. In the book, she wrote that she was exploring the opportunity to teach GED classes at an undisclosed women’s prison.

Jill Biden is ‘pained’ by East Wing devastation

Jill Biden said people in Washington sent her photos of the demolition, adding, “I could barely watch.”

The east wing, which traditionally housed the offices of first ladies and their staff, along with the welfare office, military office and other key operations, was demolished last year under President Donald Trump to make way for the ballroom, the AP reported.

“A major landmark and historical treasure was treated like an extreme fixer on HGTV’s ‘Property Brothers,'” she wrote, adding that what “pained” me was the “symbolic bulldozing of history and erasure of institutional memory.”

Anger over husband’s prostate cancer diagnosis

She noticed that a year before they left the White House, Biden began waking up repeatedly in the middle of the night. She alerted his doctor and urged him to see a urologist.

About four months after leaving office, in May 2025, he was diagnosed with stage IV prostate cancer that had spread to his bones. Biden underwent daily radiation treatments for five and a half weeks and takes hormone pills that can cause fatigue and moodiness.

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“But we couldn’t stay in grief because we were immediately put on the defensive, accused of hiding his illness,” she wrote.

The White House has an office and presidents have access to the best medical care.

“Joe couldn’t cut off his big toe without 10 people wanting to run at him waving gauze packs,” she wrote. “You put the president in bubble wrap and he ends up with stage IV prostate cancer? It didn’t make sense.”