Jill Biden reignites the Democrats’ age argument by questioning if Joe Biden had a stroke during 2024 debate

CNN

By Eric Bradner, Dana Bash, CNN

(CNN) — Jill Biden’s new comments about Joe Biden’s disastrous 2024 debate have reignited a conversation that tore the Democratic Party apart during and after the now-former president’s performance.

Biden told CBS News in an interview clip published Wednesday that her husband’s stumbles and apparent confusion “scared me to death,” and she worried her husband was having a stroke.

“I was frightened, because I had never ever seen Joe like that before or since. Never,” Jill Biden told CBS News in an interview slated to air Sunday. CBS published a clip from the interview Wednesday.

“I don’t know what happened,” she said. “As I watched it, I thought, ‘Oh, my God, he’s having a stroke.’ And it scared me to death.”

The interview comes ahead of the June 2 publication of Jill Biden’s new memoir, “View From the East Wing.”

The Atlantic on Thursday published its account of the book. It reported that the former first lady writes in it that as she watched the debate, she wondered: “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 comments were a blunt acknowledgement, nearly two years after the fact, of what tens of millions of Americans watched in real time: Biden, then 81 and facing concerns about his age and health, turned in a disastrous performance that undermined his bid for a second term. A hoarse Biden repeatedly stumbled over words and phrases as he delivered meandering responses to questions.

Many Democrats were angry that Jill Biden was turning attention onto an issue that had so badly hampered Democrats – and one the party has struggled to address. The Democratic National Committee’s post-campaign autopsy omitted the issue altogether.

“At a moment when are finally moving beyond the Biden age debacle, and have Trump on the ropes ahead of November, the last thing we need right now is to rip open that wound,” one House Democrat in a competitive district said to CNN’s Dana Bash on the condition of anonymity.

But a Democrat who is in a tough race in November downplayed any concerns, saying the former president still has support among Black voters and said many Democrats “still have very warm feelings toward Biden.”

“I think he’s seen in the lens of compassion, like the grandpa who didn’t want to give up the keys,” that Democrat said. “Their anger with Trump supersedes any animosity toward Biden.“

What Jill Biden and aides said, then and now

Biden’s campaign – and Jill Biden – worked hard to put a positive spin on the debate immediately afterward. Biden’s aides insisted the debate was an anomaly – one bad night from an aging, but still energetic and competent, president.

In a post-debate event that night, Jill Biden said, “Joe, you did such a great job. You answered every question. You knew all the facts.”

According to The Atlantic, that’s different from what she told him immediately afterward. The president knew the debate had been a political disaster right away, in her telling.

She writes that as he walked off stage, he said to her: “I really f**ked up, didn’t I?”

“‘Yes, you did,’ I whispered back,” she writes.

A senior Biden administration official who spoke on the condition of anonymity called Jill Biden’s comments in the CBS News interview “quite an untimely revelation.”

“She should have said it at the time because that fear reveals immediate concerns about his wellbeing, his health fragility, and his vulnerability, and brings into question his fitness for continued office,” the official told CNN’s Jake Tapper.

Bash and Tapper were co-moderators of the CNN debate.

The age debate continues

In the book, according to The Atlantic, Jill Biden writes that her husband “was definitely aging” in office, and floated the idea of a one-term presidency as early as his successful 2020 run for the White House. She said in 2023, she raised the prospect of not running for reelection to spare family members, including son Hunter Biden, from Republican attacks — but Joe Biden rejected the idea.

During the debate, she writes, she wondered if he had traveled too much, was battling illness, or had taken Ambien or codeine cough syrup to fight off a cold. She writes that she thought about asking for a blood test after the debate.

“To this day, I still don’t know what happened. Why wasn’t he making any sense? It was inexplicable to me,” she writes, according to The Atlantic.

Shortly after the debate, Biden traveled to North Carolina, where he acknowledged he was “not a young man. I don’t walk as easily as I used to. I don’t talk as smoothly as I used to. I don’t debate as well as I used to.”

But in late July – less than four weeks after the debate, and with the Democratic Party in a panic over the prospect of a disastrous election – Biden withdrew from the 2024 presidential race and threw his support behind his vice president, Kamala Harris.

In an interview last spring on ABC’s “The View,” Joe Biden said claims he faced cognitive decline during his term in office, including in “Original Sin,” a book by Tapper and Axios’ Alex Thompson, were “wrong” and said there is “nothing to sustain that.”

Jill Biden also jumped in to defend her husband in the ABC interview, claiming his schedule as president was “nonstop.”

“The people who wrote those books were not in the White House with us, and they didn’t see how hard Joe worked every single day,” she said. “I mean, he’d get up, he put in a full day, and then at night … I’d be in bed, you know, reading my book, and he was still on the phone, reading his briefings, working with staff.”

Wariness about the midterms

A Democratic strategist working on midterm races said Jill Biden’s comments are “really unhelpful” and undermine the potential lift some Democrats could get with a Biden endorsement.

Another Democratic strategist agreed re-opening the debate was unhelpful but will not affect how voters cast their ballots.

“They’re going to vote based on what individual candidates seeking to represent them will do to improve their lives. It’s about looking forward, and that’s where the focus of our party (generally) is and needs to continue to be,” that strategist said.

Colorado Rep. Jason Crow said that “it’s not the best that this keeps coming up every few months, but it’s also not that big of a deal.”

“There’s just way too much else going on for people to be too concerned about it. I almost never hear anyone outside DC talking about it,” he said. “What’s done is done. The new generation of (Democratic) leaders are stepping up and taking power. We’re doing things differently and moving forward.”

This story has been updated with additional details.

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