Jill Biden said she was frightened by Joe Biden’s June 2024 debate performance and thought at one point, “Oh, my God, he’s having a stroke,” in a newly aired interview that put fresh strain on the story of his failed reelection bid. The interview, with CBS News Sunday Morning’s Rita Braver, was scheduled to air on Sunday.
“I was frightened, because I had never ever seen Joe like that before or since. Never,” she said, adding, “I don’t know what happened.” Joe Biden, then 81 and running for a second term, debated Donald Trump in June 2024 and struggled through a performance that left Democrats uneasy. He had a raspy voice, his team said he was ill, and he also seemed to lose his train of thought while the two men sparred over immigration, the economy and abortion rights.
The debate quickly became the turning point in a campaign that had already begun to wobble. Afterward, Democrats publicly and privately pressed for him to step aside, but his campaign initially insisted he would remain the party’s nominee. A month later, Joe Biden dropped out and endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris, becoming the first sitting president to pull out of a presidential race since Lyndon B. Johnson stepped aside in March 1968.
That retreat came after a stretch in which Biden’s debate performance, gaffes during a Nato summit and a frail demeanour after a Covid diagnosis combined to make his candidacy look increasingly unsustainable. Harris took over the Democratic nomination about three months before the election, only to lose to Trump. After that defeat, she called Biden’s decision to seek a second term “recklessness.”
Jill Biden’s account matters now because it does what supporters of the former president had long resisted: it turns the debate from a bad night into a near-catastrophe seen from inside the family. Her remarks, tied in part to her new book, View from the East Wing: A Memoir, underline how quickly the June performance became the political end of the road. The unanswered question is not whether the debate hurt Biden; it is whether the campaign ever had a realistic path after it.
