If you want a historical marker to track the decline of American civilization, you could do worse — a lot worse — than to track the decline of Democrat first ladies. Think about it: We’ve gone from Elegant Jackie Kennedy to Graceful Lady Bird Johnson to Classy Rosalynn Carter … to Crass Hillary Clinton to Snarling Michelle Obama to Scheming “Doctor” Jill Biden. Yikes.

“I was frightened,” said the former first lady to CBS News’s Rita Braver in a yet-to-be-aired interview, “because I had never ever seen Joe like that before or since. Never.” And then this: “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.”

Former first lady @DrBiden said she was “frightened” by her husband Joe Biden’s performance at the 2024 presidential debate.

“As I watched it, I thought, ‘Oh, my God, he’s having a stroke.’ And it scared me to death,” Biden told CBS News Sunday Morning’s Rita Braver in an… pic.twitter.com/1wS5oGDYyX

— CBS Sunday Morning :sunwithface: (@CBSSunday) May 27, 2026

The Bad Doctor was referring to her husband’s epic 2024 debate meltdown, his implosion of presidential proportions, his 20 seconds of deeply painful deer-in-the-headlights dementia for all the world to see. As I wrote at the time:

The worst moment of the night for Biden — indeed, the worst moment of his entire presidency, given the stakes — came when [ABC News’s Jake] Tapper asked him to respond to a question about the national debt. Biden began shakily enough, mistaking trillions for billions and millions for billions, but the wheels came off around 45 seconds into his reply, as a series of numbers seemed to overwhelm him. Amid a rambling rant about raising taxes on billionaires, he said, “We’d be able to write, wipe out his debt … making sure that we’re able to make every single solitary person, uh, eligible for what I’ve been able to do with the, uh, with, with, with the COVID, uh, ‘scuse me, with, um, dealing with, everything we had to do with, uh … look … if … we finally beat Medicare.”

I’m sorry, Doctor Jill with the Junk Ed.D, but never ever? Before or since? Hmm. Perhaps she forgot that time at the 2021 G7 Summit in England, when she had to rescue her lost puppy of a husband from wandering off. Or that time at the 2024 G7 Summit in Italy, when Italian Prime Minister Georgia Meloni had to do much the same thing. Perhaps she’s forgotten about the fluorescent tape his aides laid out on the carpet to keep him from getting lost at a small fundraiser. I could go on, of course.

If I didn’t know better, I’d swear this was the desperate attempt of an embittered first lady to schlep her new memoir, to do damage repair to the disastrous Biden presidency, and to rehabilitate her own image as an ambitious schemer and elder abuser.

So she thought he had a stroke, eh? I get it. What a horrible thing to witness. And her response is entirely plausible. Oh, how awful, my beloved Joey’s having a stroke, and I’m so frightened. But, hey, he can still run for another four-year term of The Toughest Job in the World.

Uh-huh. Entirely plausible.

But why now? What’s her angle? Why is Jill Biden chumming the political waters with this bovine excrement right now? I can think of two other reasons besides books sales: first, the DNC’s so-called 2024 election autopsy, which, however weak and dodgy and unsatisfactory, reminds us all of where we were as a nation just two years ago with a cognitively addled commander-in-chief and the behind-the-scenes apparatus that had been propping him up for years; and second, the lawsuit filed by, ahem, her husband on Tuesday to block the release by the Trump DOJ of the audio recordings and transcripts of Biden’s interviews with a ghostwriter named Mark Zwonitzer, who essentially wrote the dementing Biden’s memoirs for him. What those recordings and transcripts will no doubt give us is further proof — as if it’s really needed — of just what a cognitive mess our 46th president was.

As I noted about Lady MacBiden in the run-up to the 2024 election, were it not for her, that self-described “bridge” president, that “elderly man with a poor memory” would never have sought out a second term. And yet it’s not entirely fair to lump her in with Lady Macbeth, is it? I mean, Shakespeare’s original villainess had an attack of conscience, an overwhelming sense of guilt, when she cried, “Out, damned spot!” Jill Biden, on the other hand, wants us to feel sorry for her.

Remember: Right after the debate, she congratulated her husband like he was a third-grader, gleefully announcing in front of the cameras, “Joe, you did such a great job answering every question! You knew all the facts.”

“This,” as Just the News correspondent Jerry Dunleavy posts, “is called a limited hangout. Biden’s performance in the 2024 debate against Trump was not much different than how Biden appeared in multiple public appearances prior to that — it wasn’t shocking for politicos watching him closely, and definitely wasn’t shocking for his wife.”

How bad is Doctor Jill’s yarn? Not even the friendlies are buying it. “Unfortunately,” said Michael LaRosa, who served as the first lady’s communications director, “when you wait this long to tell your own story in your own words, it’s extremely hard to put the toothpaste back in the tube. She owed it to herself to be candid and transparent in the moment or the days after.” Exactly so.

First ladies, of all people, are supposed to be above this kind of deplorable behavior. But not Jill Biden. As our Mark Alexander trenchantly observed, “She just established herself to be every bit the liar Joe Biden is.”

Around five years ago, at Peak Pathetic Biden, I wrote a piece titled, “Jill Biden Could’ve Kept Us from This.” That column has aged pretty well.

Unlike Joe and Jill Biden.