Former US first lady's book revives debate over Biden’s health in 2024 Debate performance left her wondering “is this a stroke?"

Comments made by former US First Lady Jill Biden about her husband’s condition during the infamous presidential campaign have reignited a debate that deeply divided the Democratic Party during and after Joe Biden’s disastrous debate performance against Donald Trump.

In an interview with American broadcaster CBS News, Jill Biden admitted that her husband’s visible confusion and stumbles during the now-infamous televised debate left her wondering whether he might have been suffering a stroke.

“I was frightened, because I had never ever seen Joe like that before or since. Never,” Biden told the outlet in excerpts released this week ahead of the full interview airing this weekend.

The interview comes just days before the June 2 release of her memoir, View From the East Wing.

American magazine The Atlantic published excerpts from the book this week, including a passage in which Jill Biden recalls watching the debate and thinking: “Is this a stroke? I felt like we were watching an AI hologram of the man we knew, and the hologram was glitching. Has he been drugged?”

According to the outlet, her remarks amount to a striking admission of nearly two years of something that millions of Americans observed as well, when Biden, then 81, delivered a faltering debate performance that intensified concerns about his age and fitness for office and ultimately derailed his bid for a second term.

Reaction within Democratic circles has been sharply divided. Some party figures are frustrated that Jill Biden has revived an issue many Democrats had hoped to move beyond.

“At a moment when we are finally moving beyond the Biden age debacle, and have Trump on the ropes ahead of November, the last thing we need right now is to rip open that wound,” one House Democrat told reporters on condition of anonymity.

The memoir also appears to contradict Jill Biden’s public reaction immediately after the debate. At the time, the Biden campaign attempted to downplay concerns over the president’s performance, with the former first lady publicly praising him at a post-debate rally.

In the memoir, however, she describes a much grimmer private moment. According to the excerpts published by The Atlantic, President Biden himself realised immediately that the debate had been politically catastrophic. As he walked off stage, he reportedly asked her: “I really f**ked up, didn’t I?” to which she replied: “Yes, you did.”

A senior former Biden administration official, speaking anonymously, described Jill Biden’s comments in the CBS interview as “quite an untimely revelation.”

The memoir also reveals that Jill Biden considered asking doctors to perform a blood test following the debate.

“To this day, I still don’t know what happened. Why wasn’t he making any sense? It was inexplicable to me,” she writes, according to The Atlantic.

She adds that during the debate, she wondered whether exhaustion, illness, or medication may have played a role, writing that she considered whether Biden had travelled too much or taken Ambien or codeine cough syrup while recovering from a cold.

By Nazrin Sadigova