Jill Biden recounted the night of the June 2024 presidential debate in an interview with NPR’s Newsmakers podcast, saying she feared her husband might be having a stroke. She said doctors checked him moments after they left the stage — a timeline that differs from the Biden administration’s earlier account that doctors examined the president “days” after the debate.
“We got off the stage,” Biden told NPR’s Scott Detrow. “I went to get my stuff. He went with his group, and then we met up in the car, and then the doctors, you know, checked him out and said, ‘Oh, he’s fine.’”
Biden said she had no explanation for her husband’s performance, calling it “inexplicable.” She said she had never seen the president in that state before or since, and pushed back against reports from Axios and other outlets that quoted former staffers who said the poor performance was not an isolated incident.
“No one came to me and said that,” Biden said.
Shortly after the debate, Joe Biden dropped out of the presidential race and endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris, who went on to lose the general election to President Donald Trump.
In the interview, Jill Biden confirmed that her husband had originally planned to serve only one term but changed his mind after the 2022 midterm elections. “Everybody kept saying, ‘You’ve got to … The midterms were good. We’ve got to keep going,’” she said. “And so that’s why he made the decision to keep running.”
When asked whether she would have done anything differently, Biden said she regretted the hurt her family endured. “To look back, I wouldn’t want anybody to go through that,” she said. “No, I never want to go through that again.”
The interview is part of a promotional tour for Biden’s memoir, “View from the East Wing,” in which she also details her thoughts on Harris and Biden’s decision to pardon his son, Hunter Biden.