The Patriot Post® · Jill Biden's Memoir Is a Vain Rewrite

Former First Lady Jill Biden’s new memoir has hit the bookshelves. In View From the East Wing, she reflects on her time in the White House and on her husband’s disastrous, aborted 2024 reelection campaign.

Jill Biden’s book attempts to change the reality of her husband’s time in the White House — to rewrite the fact that he wasn’t alert, engaged, or even in control of his own presidency. Both Jill and the entire Democrat Party intentionally ignored and covered up what was obvious to the rest of the country and the world, something everyone admitted except the very people who wanted to keep Joe Biden in power.

Joe Biden’s cognitive implosion on national television during the 2024 presidential debate with Donald Trump forced everyone to confront reality. No one was there to cut off questions from the press or to shuffle him off the stage. One particular nonsensical answer, culminating in the garbled “we finally beat Medicare,” was one of the most shocking moments in presidential debate history.

Back in the 1970s, we used to mock the Soviet Union for propping up senile and mentally incapacitated leaders like Leonid Brezhnev. Now America had its own Brezhnev. Biden’s reelection bid effectively ended in less than a minute on television. Only then did the Democrat establishment and its media sycophants begin to publicly state what everyone else — including us — had been saying since before he was even elected: Biden wasn’t up to the job physically or mentally.

In her memoir, Jill Biden writes about her concern over Joe’s health on the night of the debate. After the debate, she says she wondered, “Is he short circuiting? I thought… Is this a stroke? … Has he been drugged?” She adds, “To this day, I still don’t know what happened.”

A couple of weeks ago, she said she wondered if he was having a stroke — without also considering that she should stop the debate to get him medical help.

Jill wants us to believe her husband suffered a senior moment and that otherwise old Joe was as sharp as a tack. But it’s impossible to swallow this assertion when there were so many other moments that made people gasp as Joe stepped up to the microphone. We’ve been told for years that Jill Biden is one of the smartest women in America. No one refers to her without adding the pretentious preface, “Dr.” But during the debate, the doctor and natural-born teacher couldn’t figure it out.

In her book, Biden reflects on that night: “The biggest lesson for us, I think, was that if you don’t explain something well enough then the question won’t go away. … There was never a satisfying enough explanation offered for Joe’s debate performance, and a lot of people never got over it.”

A lot of people never got over it because they knew they were being lied to by Jill Biden, the Democratic Party, and the media playing along with the narrative. Mark Twain once said, “Get your facts first, and then you can distort them as much as you please.” This book is light on facts but heavy on distortion.

“She’s been a politician’s wife for almost half a century,” Caitlin Flanagan writes at The Free Press, “and if her attention is no longer on the next campaign, it’s fixed on her husband’s legacy. Still, toward the end, the book provided a shimmer of what she thinks about the Democratic Party shanking her husband and the belief shared by many journalists that they were duped — by Jill Biden, among others — about the biggest story of the decade: President Biden’s obvious decline.”

Defending Joe Biden’s legacy has a personal element that’s easy to understand. Anyone in Jill Biden’s position would try to make that period seem better than it was. Joe Biden is famous for his lies, but some of the assertions made in Jill’s memoir are such a stretch that a decent person would’ve thought twice before sending in the manuscript.

As The Wall Street Journal’s Barton Swain explains, “The perverse effect of Mrs. Biden’s book will be to perpetuate the belief among Democrats that they lost because she and her husband’s inner circle hid the truth about his decrepitude. That they did hide the truth, or tried to, Mrs. Biden manages to make more obvious. She’s a bad fibber.”

Why would Jill Biden and the Democrats allow Joe Biden to run for another term, knowing that he wasn’t mentally or physically capable of handling the responsibility? Why would a wife do that to her husband?

Swain adds, “Mr. Biden’s Democratic apologists mistakenly assumed that because he and the people around him held the right views — they favored all the good things and opposed all the bad — his bodily and mental infirmity wouldn’t matter. Jill Biden thought the same, which is why she felt so comfortable putting her husband up for another four-year term.”

It’s no surprise that the former first lady’s attempt to portray her husband’s presidency in the most positive light doesn’t sit well with people who already clearly saw Joe Biden’s decline. It’s also opening old wounds that Democrat strategists fear might distract their party’s momentum heading into the 2026 midterms.

There’s an old saying that some books are better left on the shelf, and this is one of them. Jill Biden’s attempt to rewrite the narrative of Joe Biden’s presidency is a shamelessly transparent effort to protect his (and her) legacy. It was an opportunity Jill and the Democrats had back in early 2024 when they encouraged him to seek the nomination — despite knowing that it was really time for Joe to retire to the Delaware shore.