WASHINGTON — Now she tells us.
Jill Biden has claimed in a new interview that she thought her husband Joe was “having a stroke” during his infamous 2024 debate with Donald Trump, after she staunchly defended her husband from the immediate political fallout.
“I was frightened, because I had never, ever seen Joe like that before or since. Never,” she told CBS News in a sitdown set to air in full Sunday ahead of the June 2 release of her memoir, “View from the East Wing.”
“I don’t know what happened,” she added. “As I watched it, I thought, ‘Oh, my God, he’s having a stroke.’ And it scared me to death.”
Then-President Biden shocked the nation during the June 27, 2024, debate, repeatedly freezing on camera, fumbling for answers and appearing dazed and confused.
Jill Biden played the supportive spouse in the immediate aftermath, joining him at an Atlanta Waffle House and praising him for a job well done.
“Joe – you did such a great job,” she said during an event with reeling supporters. “You answered every question, you knew all the facts.”
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In subsequent days, the first lady defended her husband to those who doubted his mental capabilities.
Now, one former White House staffer told The Post, Jill’s purported candor is too little, too late.
“Unfortunately, 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,” said Michael LaRosa, who served as the then-first lady’s communications director during her first year in the East Wing.
“The cake is already baked when it comes to shaping public perception about that time and about her,” he added. “Penning books doesn’t cut it anymore.”
But a source close to the former first lady defended her comments and said she was simply telling her side of the story.
“She tried to dig deep and explore the answers to some of the questions she knows that are out there,” this source said.
Other Democrats who worked with Joe Biden said they were hardly surprised that Jill Biden’s rosy public comments about her husband’s capabilities, both before and after the debate, were apparently untruthful — since they long suspected that she operated with outsized influence in the White House as the then-president’s faculties waned.
One ex-aide quipped that another, more accurate title for the memoir could be: “View From the East Wing, Blindfold On.”
“Find it in the fiction aisle of your local bookstore,” this person added.
At the time, the White House offered a plethora of excuses for Biden’s performance, initially blaming a cold before pivoting to jet lag from an overseas trip taken two weeks earlier, before finally claiming that he had prepped so hard for the debate that he got facts jumbled in his head.
“Why did we push out he had a cold,” asked one Biden administration alum Wednesday night, “if she thought he had a stroke?”
Ultimately, Biden dropped out of the presidential race July 21, 2024, under pressure from his own party, endorsing then-Vice President Kamala Harris to take his place.
Biden’s health had been an issue from the moment he announced he’d seek a second term in April 2023. At the time, he was 81 and the oldest person ever elected president.
Jill was one of his staunchest defenders, saying publicly her husband would finish the job.
But behind the scenes, she was pressuring aides to let the president rest more and took a major role in handling his schedule, former White House chief of staff Jeff Zients told a House committee investigating a potential cover-up of the president’s declining health.
When Joe Biden exited the race, Jill campaigned for Harris, who ultimately suffered an Electoral College landslide to Trump and became the first Democrat in 20 years to lose the popular vote.
Neither Jill nor publisher Gallery Books have said how much she has been paid for the tome.
The Bidens are believed to need the funds from her book as well as a memoir the former president is writing. The couple left the White House as one of the poorest in presidential history, with financial disclosures showing cash assets worth between $632,000 and $1.38 million.
Meanwhile, former first son Hunter Biden has racked up millions of dollars in legal fees as he fought federal gun and tax evasion charges in court — only to have his father pardon him in the final months of his presidency.
