“Joe, you did such a great job! You answered every question, you knew all the facts,” then-First Lady Jill Biden told her husband after the infamous 2024 presidential debate against now President Donald Trump.
But Jill has now admitted she didn’t even believe that herself.
In an interview with CBS News ahead of the release of her memoir Views from the East Wing, Jill said she actually thought her husband was “having a stroke.”
“I was frightened, because I had never, ever seen Joe like that before or since. Never,” Jill said. She went on to add, “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.”
It scared Jill so much that she immediately whisked her possibly stroking husband to an Atlanta Waffle House.
But according to The Atlantic’s Toluse Olorunnipa, an important goal of the former First Lady’s new book is “dispel[ling] bipartisan accusations that she was a hidden hand covering up her aging husband’s cognitive decline and nudging him to cling to power longer than his mind and body could sustain.”
“As his closest confidant and the person who saw him even when his staff was not around, the former first lady has faced a deluge of conspiracy theories that place her at the center of what critics describe as a grand cover-up,” Olorunnipa wrote. (Notably, Olorunnipa purposely left out the fact that Jill told her husband he did “such a great job.”)
But none of it was ever a “conspiracy theory.” Jill herself just admitted that she publicly pretended that her husband did “such a great job” while privately worrying he was incapacitated. Yet Olorunnipa continued to frame Jill’s upcoming memoir as though she is the victim of a Republican conspiracy theory about her husband’s failing mental health.
It’s the same narrative spouted by other members of the propaganda press for years: Everyone — from the propaganda press to Biden’s own wife — was the “victim” of Joe Biden’s sneaky deception campaign to hide his own cognitive decline.
The narrative features prominently in Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson’s book Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again, which claimed to expose the cover-up of Biden’s cognitive decline. Notably it was Tapper who accused Lara Trump of “mocking [Biden’s] stutter” when she questioned Biden’s mental health. Two years earlier, Tapper said Biden was “sharp … mentally.”
More examples of Tapper’s involvement in the cover-up can be found in this article by The Federalist’s Shawn Fleetwood. Thompson once dismissed Biden saying, “God Save the Queen, man” after a speech on gun violence as just one of “Biden’s weird phrases.” The “phrases,” Thompson said, had been “weaponized by the GOP to insinuate the 80-year-old president is in mental decline.”
Nonetheless, their book features testimony from an anonymous cabinet member who admitted they “didn’t have access” to the president “for months” and that the White House was engaged in a “deliberate strategy” to keep Biden hidden. In this telling, the “victims” of Biden’s sneaky deception campaign were his own cabinet members. The other purported “victims” were the members of the propaganda press.
Days before the debate, Oliver Darcy wrote for CNN: “Right-wing media figures are desperately pushing conspiracy theories about Biden ahead of the debate.” The “conspiracy theories” in question were that Biden is a “senile, mentally incapacitated elderly man who cannot remember what he had for breakfast, let alone run the federal government.”
Noah Berlatsky of The Independent wrote in July of 2023: “Let’s fact check Biden’s so-called mental decline” and argued that “questions about the president’s fitness for office aren’t in good faith.”
NBC News’ Matt Dixon, Dasha Burns, and Alex Tabet wrote in October of 2023, “Republicans float a quiet conspiracy theory that Biden won’t be on the ballot,” adding the theory was “centered largely on the thought that Biden is too old and not sharp enough mentally.”
These outlets and reporters — with innumerable resources — want you to believe the reason they wrote pieces dismissing legitimate concerns from Republicans was that they were simply unable to uncover the story of a century because they too were deceived by Biden. It’s part of the reason why Tapper and Thompson released their book — it was supposed to explain away two glaring realities: The corporate media didn’t cover the actual story, and when they did talk about Biden’s mental state, they did so to smear or dismiss anyone who questioned Biden’s acuity. The propaganda press was actually obscuring its own involvement in the cover-up of Biden’s cognitive decline.
Now, even after Biden’s collapse is impossible to deny, the cover-up hasn’t actually ended; it’s merely moved onto the next phase, that is, pretending that people who outright lied about Biden’s condition were merely victims of a “right-wing” conspiracy. Jill Biden admitting she thought her husband was “having a stroke” while publicly trying to reassure the nation he was fine only makes the cover-up harder to hide, and yet outlets like The Atlantic are still trying anyway.
