Jill Biden is making waves again — and this time, she is standing firmly behind her husband’s doomed 2024 campaign.
The former first lady, 74, claimed Joe Biden could have defeated Donald Trump in the 2024 presidential election, even after the brutal debate performance that sent panic through the Democratic Party and helped push him out of the race.
Her comments came while promoting her new memoir, View from the East Wing, and they are already stirring up fresh debate about one of the most dramatic political meltdowns in modern election history.
During a June 2 appearance on Morning Joe, Jill was asked about the fallout from Joe’s disastrous June 2024 debate against Trump.
That night became a turning point.
The then-president, who was 81 at the time, appeared shaky, confused and at times unable to clearly finish his thoughts. Millions of Americans watched as Democratic insiders reportedly began asking the same terrifying question behind the scenes: Could Joe Biden actually make it to Election Day?
But Jill insisted that, at the time, the polls still showed Joe as the Democrat with the best shot at beating Trump.
“People were doing polling, ‘Who could beat Trump?’ and the only person who polled that said they could beat Trump was Joe Biden, and that’s why he decided to continue on,” she said.
When host Willie Geist asked whether Joe regretted dropping out, Jill did not give a direct answer.
Instead, she described how painful the experience was for the Biden family.
“I would never want anyone I loved to go through that again,” she said. “It was so painful. Not just for us, not just for me, and for Joe, but we have children and grandchildren. And to see them have to go through that was a really hard thing, a hard time for our family.”
Geist pressed again, asking whether Joe still believed he would have defeated Trump.
Jill answered for herself.
“I believe he would have beat Donald Trump in that election,” she said.
The remark comes after Jill made another stunning admission about the debate that rocked Washington.
In an interview with CBS News Sunday Morning on May 31, Jill said Joe’s performance frightened her so badly that she wondered if he was suffering a stroke.
“I was frightened, because I had never, ever seen Joe like that before or since. Never,” she said.
She added, “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.”
The debate fallout was swift and vicious.
Top Democrats began openly worrying about Biden’s fitness for the race. Hollywood donor George Clooney delivered one of the most damaging blows in a July 2024 New York Times essay, writing that Democrats were “not going to win in November with this president.”
Clooney also claimed he had personally noticed Biden’s decline.
On Morning Joe, Geist brought up the anger among Democrats who felt they may have been misled about Biden’s condition. He noted that some believed advisers and members of the media had protected Biden by keeping him away from a more demanding public schedule.
Jill pushed back hard.
“If we were hiding him behind the scenes, why did we ask the Trump team for the debate?” she said. “I mean, we were the ones that proposed it. If that were true, why did we put him out there?”
She added, “I don’t think he was protected.”
But the debate changed everything.
Weeks later, Joe Biden ended his reelection campaign, saying it was in the “best interest” of the country and the Democratic Party. Vice President Kamala Harris was moved to the top of the ticket.
The gamble did not work.
Trump went on to defeat Harris, winning all seven swing states and the popular vote.
Now, Jill Biden is making it clear she believes history could have gone very differently.
To her, Joe was not finished.
To many voters, that debate showed he was.
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