President Joe Biden embraces First Lady Jill Biden following the CNN Presidential Debate at the CNN Studios on June 27, 2024, in Atlanta, Georgia. (Justin Sullivan / Getty Images)
By Michael Schwarz May 29, 2026 at 9:24am
In her new memoir, “View from the East Wing,” former First Lady Jill Biden recalled affirming her husband’s blunt assessment of his disastrous 2024 debate performance against now-President Donald Trump.
“I really f***ed up, didn’t I?” then-President Joe Biden whispered to his wife shortly after the debate. “Yes, you did,” she replied.
That revelation appeared in a review of the memoir by Toluse Olorunnipa of The Atlantic. Olorunnipa noted that his outlet received an advance copy of the memoir, set for release on Tuesday.
On June 27, 2024, President Biden took the debate stage against then-Republican presidential nominee Trump.
At various points in that debate, Biden’s brain appeared to freeze. He slurred his words, looked confused, and sounded incoherent.
“To this day, I still don’t know what happened. Why wasn’t he making any sense? It was inexplicable to me,” Jill wrote in her memoir, per The Atlantic.
“I only wish I had the answer,” she later added.
That explanation did not appear to satisfy Olorunnipa, who added the following parenthetical note: “You could forgive the reader for wondering, Well, did you ask him?“
The first lady also insisted that her husband’s debate performance came out of nowhere.
“The truth was, Joe was not who he was on a day-to-day basis in that debate,” she wrote.
Jill also said that she thought the president might be having a stroke, a claim she repeated in a forthcoming interview with CBS News.
Notwithstanding the former first lady’s account, President Biden faced numerous questions about his cognitive fitness long before that debate.
For instance, special counsel Robert Hur partially justified his February 2024 decision not to charge the then-president with willfully retaining classified documents as a private citizen because a jury, in Hur’s words, would likely find the president a “sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”
More broadly, President Biden’s debate performance and Trump’s subsequent victory over then-Vice President Kamala Harris in the 2024 election have haunted Democrats for nearly two years.
Last week, in fact, a partially finished “autopsy” report on the 2024 election from the DNC was released to the public. The autopsy came out in such poor condition, with barely any sourcing, that the DNC effectively disavowed its own report.
In 2025, of course, Harris published her own recrimination-filled memoir of the 2024 campaign.
Likewise, CNN’s Jake Tapper penned an account of President Biden’s decline and the cover-up surrounding it.
While Democrats continue to dissect and lament Biden’s debate performance, the fact remains that around the time of that infamous debate, Trump already held a significant polling edge.
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Michael Schwarz holds a Ph.D. in History and has taught at multiple colleges and universities. He has published one book and numerous essays on Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and the Early U.S. Republic. He loves dogs, baseball, and freedom. After meandering spiritually through most of early adulthood, he has rediscovered his faith in midlife and is eager to continue learning about it from the great Christian thinkers.
Michael Schwarz holds a Ph.D. in History and has taught at multiple colleges and universities. He has published one book and numerous essays on Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and the Early U.S. Republic. He loves dogs, baseball, and freedom. After meandering spiritually through most of early adulthood, he has rediscovered his faith in midlife and is eager to continue learning about it from the great Christian thinkers.
