The Guardian columnist Arwa Mahdawi published a sharp critique Saturday of former first lady Jill Biden’s memoir “View from the East Wing,” accusing the former first lady of “rewriting history and dodging accountability for the 2024 loss.”
In her column, Mahdawi cited CNN anchor Jake Tapper as a prominent critic of the memoir. According to the column, Tapper joined “a chorus of voices” disputing Jill Biden’s account. The columnist highlighted a specific passage in which Jill Biden writes that if her husband had exhibited cognitive impairment, “neither she nor her staff would have hesitated to do something about it” and that “he was nowhere near that point in the summer of 2024.” Tapper, the column reported, responded that “all of that is very difficult to believe, if not just downright false.”
The column also recounted that Jill Biden wrote she thought Joe Biden was having a stroke during the June 2024 debate and was “scared to death.” Former President Donald Trump seized on the description, asking on Fox News why the couple then went to a Waffle House after the debate.
Hunter Biden responded to the criticism in a post on X on Wednesday. “So let me get this straight,” Hunter Biden wrote. “Jake Tapper is focused on attacking my Mom. Jared and Ivanka are building a private island paradise on Albanian protected land. Don Jr married the daughter of Epstein’s banker, and a startup his fund backs just got a record $620M Pentagon loan. Eric is taking an Israeli drone company public for $1.5B in the middle of a war with Iran that nobody wanted. And I know: ‘But what about your paintings, Hunter?’ Please.” Hunter Biden argued that his family’s critics should not be immune from scrutiny, but he and his mother should similarly not be singled out.
Mahdawi also took issue with the memoir’s treatment of the war in Gaza, writing that Jill Biden “spends just two and a half pages talking about Palestine and the conflict that helped torpedo her husband’s reelection efforts.” The column noted that the memoir recounts a Post-it note Jill Biden left on her husband’s mirror after Israeli airstrikes killed World Central Kitchen workers in April 2024, reading “Net has to stop.” White House officials later clarified that the first lady “was not calling for Israel to end its efforts against Hamas,” according to the column. Jill Biden wrote in the memoir: “What a lesson in the price of speaking up! Ten words on a Post-it urging peace and I was in trouble?” Mahdawi called the statement “breathtakingly out-of-touch.”
The columnist drew parallels between the Biden memoir and what she described as a lack of accountability across the Democratic Party, pointing to Vice President Kamala Harris’s memoir “107 Days” as “an exercise in self-delusion” and criticizing the DNC’s 2024 post-election autopsy. Mahdawi noted that the autopsy, which was initially shelved and then released after backlash, contained two glaring omissions: “Biden’s age” and “Gaza.” She cited Norman Solomon, who wrote in the Guardian that “in an autopsy of close to 50,000 words, not one of them is ‘Gaza’, or ‘Palestinians’ or ‘Israel’ or ‘genocide’.”
Mahdawi further noted that Hunter Biden has gained a new public profile since his father left office, starting a Substack and appearing on Candace Owens’ podcast, and that some are “musing that Hunter Biden might run for president in 2028.” She quoted former President Trump as saying, “If the guy from Maine can do well, I guess Hunter could do well, too.”