In new memoir, Jill Biden wonders whether acknowledging Joe's poor debate would have been better

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WASHINGTON (AP) — In her new memoir, former first lady Jill Biden reflects on former President Joe Biden's poor debate performance against Donald Trump nearly two years ago and wonders whether it would have been better to acknowledge it rather than reassure supporters afterward.

The Democrat's performance ultimately proved to be his undoing as he campaigned for reelection, amplifying concerns about whether the then-81-year-old could serve a second term. He ultimately dropped his bid under pressure from within his party and endorsed his vice president, Kamala Harris, who lost to the Republican Trump.

In “View from the East Wing,” a memoir about her White House years that's being published next Tuesday, she said she still doesn’t know why her husband performed so disastrously that day.

The Associated Press obtained a copy of the book's 274-page manuscript, which includes her first public comments about the debate and the ensuing chain of events that sent Joe Biden back to private life in Delaware sooner than he had envisioned.

The book also covers his prostate cancer diagnosis after leaving office and their son Hunter's federal trial on gun charges, among other issues during Joe Biden's term, along with how she juggled the added responsibilities of being first lady and her teaching career.

Here are some highlights from the book:

Jill Biden writes that her husband “looked bleary” in their hotel suite in Atlanta before the debate. She was confident he would do well, she said, because big events energized him. But when the CNN-sponsored event began, “I immediately noticed that Joe didn't look good. He didn't seem himself from the opening.”

A few minutes in, he said something out of turn about how “we finally beat Medicare.”

“Is he short-circuiting? I thought,” she wrote. “Is this a stroke? It felt like we were watching an AI hologram of the man we knew, and the hologram was glitching.”

She wondered if he had been drugged or was experiencing a medical emergency.

He improved as the debate went on, “but not enough to reassure me or anyone watching that he was okay. He clearly wasn't,” Jill Biden said. “I'd never seen that look on his face before in my life.”

As they walked offstage afterward, he used colorful language to whisper to her that he had messed up, which she took as a “sign of his having returned to himself.”

But "to this day, I still don't know what happened," she wrote. They attended a post-debate rally and dropped in at a Waffle House before traveling to North Carolina for a next-day appearance.

The official explanation at the time from the White House and others close to the president was that he was suffering from a cold. But Jill Biden said she wonders if they should have acknowledged what millions of people saw — “that he looked very unwell in that debate.”

“The biggest lesson for us, I think, was that if you don't explain something well enough then the question won't go away,” she wrote. “There was never a satisfying enough explanation offered for Joe's debate performance, and a lot of people never got over it.”

Biden’s performance in the debate crystallized the concerns of many voters that he was too old to continue serving as president. It sparked a fresh round of calls for him to consider stepping aside as the party’s nominee as fellow Democrats feared a Trump return to the White House if Biden remained as their candidate.

The drumbeat of calls for him to leave the race started before the debate had ended and, “in the days to come, it would grow louder and louder,” Jill Biden wrote.

Jill Biden reveals that while she was first lady, she was terminated by the school where she had taught English and writing since 2009. She had signed her annual contract in July 2023, and a termination letter signed by the college president was hand-delivered that winter.

The grant used to pay her salary had dried up.

“I felt sick,” she wrote. “I was hosting holiday parties at the White House, so I had to go from seeing emails about my firing to groups of children belting out ’Jingle Bells.'”

Ultimately, the issue was resolved — she did not say how —- “and I kept my position.”

But she taught her last class at the school in December 2024, wrapping up a 40-year career as an educator. She wrote in the book that she's exploring an opportunity to teach GED classes at an undisclosed women's prison.

People in Washington sent her photos of the demolition and she said, “I could barely look.”

The East Wing was the historic base of operations for first ladies and their staffs, the social office, the military office and other operations. Trump had it torn down last year to build a ballroom.

“A major landmark and historic treasure was being treated like an extreme fixer-upper on HGTV’s ‘Property Brothers,’” she wrote, adding that what “pained me” was “the symbolic bulldozing of history and the eradication of institutional memory.”

She noticed that Biden started waking up repeatedly in the middle of the night in the year before they left the White House. She alerted his doctors and urged him to see a urologist.

About four months after leaving office, in May 2025, he was diagnosed with stage IV prostate cancer that had spread to his bones. Biden underwent daily radiation treatment for five and a half weeks and takes hormone pills that can cause him to become fatigued and moody.

“But we couldn't dwell in the grief because we were put immediately on the defensive, accused of having hidden his illness,” she wrote.

The White House has a doctor's office and presidents have access to the best medical care.

“Joe couldn't stub his toe without 10 people wanting to run at him waving bales of gauze," she wrote. “You put the president in bubble wrap, and he ends up with stage IV prostate cancer? It made no sense.”

Shortly before that fateful debate, Hunter Biden had been convicted of all three felony charges related to the purchase of a revolver in 2018 when, prosecutors argued, he lied on a mandatory gun-purchase form by saying he was not illegally using or addicted to drugs.

The family was surprised the case went to trial and viewed it as politically motivated.

While Joe Biden had vowed that he wouldn't pardon his son if he were convicted, the former first lady saw things differently.

“In the end, it felt like in working so hard to be impartial, we guaranteed that Hunter would meet the worst possible legal fate," she wrote. "Joe might have gone too far, in my opinion, to show that his family was being treated with complete impartiality.”

But during his final weeks in office, Biden issued pardons for Hunter, sparing him a possible prison sentence, and for Biden's siblings and their spouses, fearing they might become targets of the incoming Trump administration.