Former First Lady Jill Biden’s new memoir is called View From the East Wing. Not “a” or “the” view (which, in any case, no longer exists, at least for now, as President Trump has demolished the East Wing as part of his mission to construct an opulent ballroom). Instead, the blandly noncommittal wording makes it sound as though she had been a passive observer of events during the Biden administration, which turns out very much not to be the case. Another thing that’s missing, incidentally, is the title of “Dr.” which Jill Biden had previously insisted upon but does not appear on the cover of her book. Does she now want to appear as just plain folks?
In 2020, the essayist Joseph Epstein caused a furor with an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal in which he wrote, “Madame First Lady—Mrs. Biden—Jill—kiddo: a bit of advice on what may seem like a small but I think is a not unimportant matter. Any chance you might drop the `Dr.’ before your name? `Dr. Jill Biden’ sounds and feels fraudulent, not to say a touch comic. Your degree is, I believe, an Ed.D., a doctor of education, earned at the University of Delaware through a dissertation with the unpromising title `Student Retention at the Community College Level: Meeting Students’ Needs.’”
Dropping it, however, has not constrained Biden from making a host of self-serving assertions in her memoir. Though it was probably not her intent, Biden has reignited debate over Joe Biden’s tenure as president, when his health appeared increasingly equivocal, even as the White House pretended that everything was A-Ok. Nia-Malika Henderson, a former White House reporter, recently wrote that it represents an “act of supreme selfishness.” She added, “With her memoir, Biden has essentially confirmed the speculation that she was part of a coverup.”
In 2022 Newsmax’s James Rosen had the temerity to pose questions about Biden’s mental acuity to White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre. He was blackballed by the Biden staff. But what the White House tried so assiduously to muffle was inadvertently exposed during Biden’s presidential debate in Atlanta, Georgia with Donald Trump in June 2024. At one point, Trump remarked, “I really don’t know what he said at the end of that sentence. I don’t think he knows what he said either.”
It’s scarcely a secret that the octogenarian president was reluctant to exit the presidential race and that he provided halting support for his vice president, Kamala Harris, during her run for the presidency against Trump. But suspicions have percolated all along that it was Jill Biden who played a key role in urging him to go for a second term. Her recent statements have done nothing to dispel those suspicions. On MS Now, Biden stated, “I believe he would have beat Donald Trump in that election.” The implication, of course, is that Joe would have succeeded where Kamala failed. The truth is that he would likely have lost even more badly to Trump than did Harris.
Jill Biden writes that before the debate she worried that her husband appeared as though he were “made of clay, strangely monochromatic.” During the debate, she worried that he had suffered a stroke. “I wasn’t horrified, I was frightened, because I had never ever seen Joe like that before or since, never,” Biden said to CBS News Sunday Morning’s Rita Braver. “I don’t know what happened. I mean, when I, as I watched it, I thought, ‘Oh my God, he’s having a stroke,’ and it scared me to death.”
This was, of course, not her public stance. At a fundraiser in Greenwich Village after the debate, she said, “As Joe said earlier today, he’s not a young man. And you know, after last night’s debate, he said, ‘You know, Jill, I don’t know what happened. I didn’t feel that great.’ And I said, ‘Look, Joe, we are not going to let 90 minutes define the four years that you’ve been president.
At a rally the next day, Joe Biden, too, was blase: “Folks, I don’t walk as easy as I used to. I don’t speak as smoothly as I used to. I don’t debate as well as I used to, but … I know how to tell the truth. I know right from wrong, and I know how to do this job.” But the die was cast. Within weeks he would declare that he was no longer running for the presidency—a declaration that he should have made long before to ensure that a genuine primary took place among the Democrats. Ex-Biden aides are apparently voicing their disquiet with the former First Lady’s memoir, telling Axios that it is “tone-deaf.” Meanwhile, Hunter Biden is defending himself from charges that he left a bag of cocaine behind in the White House by declaring, “I would never have forgotten it.” As Trump dismantles much of the Biden presidency, Democrats are also eager to put it in the rear-view mirror. But will the Bidens let them?
