Jill Biden Says She Feared Joe Biden Was Having a Stroke During His Disastrous 2024 Debate
Former first lady Jill Biden revealed in an interview clip released Wednesday that during the pivotal June 2024 debate, she feared her husband, then-President Joe Biden, was experiencing a stroke — a terrifying moment that she says she had never witnessed before or since.
“I don’t know what happened. I mean, when I, as I watched it, I thought, ‘Oh, my God, he’s having a stroke.’ And it scared me to death,” Jill Biden told CBS News’ “Sunday Morning” in an interview set to air in full this weekend.
“I was frightened, because I had never ever seen Joe like that before or since. Never,” she said.
The 2024 debate, a high-stakes face-off with Donald Trump, quickly devolved into a public crisis for Biden, whose halting answers and vacant stares sparked widespread alarm over his cognitive health. At the time, Jill Biden publicly defended her husband, calling his performance “great” and insisting he “answered every question.” The White House also aggressively pushed back against mounting speculation about mental decline.
But the internal fallout was swift. Behind the scenes, Democratic strategists and party leaders began a quiet campaign to urge Biden to step aside. Three weeks after the debate, with just 107 days until the election, Biden withdrew from the race and endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris as the nominee.
In her campaign memoir, Harris wrote of the party’s collective denial: “'It’s Joe and Jill’s decision.’ We all said that, like a mantra, as if we’d all been hypnotized.” She later described Biden’s prolonged refusal to drop out as “recklessness,” though she stopped short of calling it “incapacity.”
Since leaving office, Biden, now 83, disclosed last May that he had been diagnosed with an aggressive form of prostate cancer that had metastasized to his bones. According to his office, he underwent several weeks of treatment and completed radiation therapy in October.
Biden, who has long pushed back against accusations of memory lapses and diminished mental acuity, filed a lawsuit Tuesday against the Justice Department to block the release of recordings and transcripts of private conversations with the ghostwriter of his 2017 memoir. The legal action stems from a 2024 Freedom of Information Act request by the conservative Heritage Foundation, which sought materials gathered by former special counsel Robert Hur. Hur declined to bring criminal charges over Biden’s handling of classified documents but described the former president as suffering from memory lapses — a characterization the White House denied at the time. Audio recordings of Hur’s interviews with Biden, released last year, confirmed some of those lapses.
While concerns over Biden’s age and fitness dominated the 2024 campaign, it was Donald Trump who made history by becoming the oldest person ever elected to the presidency. Trump, who frequently mocked Biden with the nickname “Sleepy Joe,” has also faced his own health questions. He has had moments of apparent drowsiness, a noticeably bruised hand, and revealed in October that he had undergone advanced imaging. On Tuesday, Trump visited Walter Reed National Military Medical Center for his third checkup in 13 months. He posted on social media that everything went “perfectly,” but the White House has not released any results or details about the outcome.
This article was originally published on NBCNews.com.