Opportunistically timed to boost sales of her soon-to-be released memoir, Jill Biden has come clean on her reaction to Joe Biden's catastrophic performance in his June 2024 debate with Donald Trump. Though she publicly lauded his performance at the time, now she admits she thought her husband was having a stroke. 

Immediately after the debate, Jill took a stage with Joe to tell him how well he had performed, in a manner that some at the time compared to a teacher praising a kindergartner:  "Joe, you did such a great job. You answered every question, you knew all the facts."  

Now, however, Jill Biden says he did so terribly that she thought he was having a major medical episode that was affecting his brain. “I don’t know what happened,” Jill Biden told CBS News Sunday Morning. “As I watched it, I thought, ‘Oh, my God, he’s having a stroke.’ And it scared me to death.”

Timing is everything: Next week, the former first lady will release her memoir, "View From The East Wing." Publisher Simon & Shuster's promotional copy for the $32 book quotes an unnamed novelist "who once wrote, 'There are stories one must tell, and years when one must tell them.' Jill Biden’s time to discuss her four years in the White House is now." 

Though Jill Biden may be offering some overdue candor about the debate that led to a tumultuous summer for the Democratic Party -- culminating in Biden withdrawing from the race after the Democratic primaries had already run their course -- she's not done putting Americans' credulity to the test. In particular, anyone who observed any number of painfully awkward Joe Biden press conferences and interviews in 2024 is going to have a hard time buying Jill Biden's ending of this sentence in her CBS interview:  "I wasn't horrified, I was frightened, because I had never, ever seen Joe like that, before or since."  

Even some Biden-administration insiders are scoffing at Jill Biden's new-found honesty. “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," Michael LaRosa, Jill Biden's communication director in 2021, told the New York Post. "She owed it to herself to be candid and transparent in the moment or the days after.” Another said her memoir should be called, "View From the East Wing, Blindfold On," adding, "Find it in the fiction aisle of your local bookstore."

As Americans staggered away from their televisions, the Biden White House tried to attribute the fiasco to jet lag and a common cold. “Why did we push out he had a cold if she thought he had a stroke?” an anonymous former Biden administration team member rhetorically asked the Post. 

Though the debate sealed Biden's political doom, it risked being a strategic disaster for then-incumbent Trump. Recall that, even as he led the polls, Trump aggressively pushed for an extraordinarily-timed debate to take place even before the Democratic convention officially made Biden the nominee. By prematurely thrusting Biden's crumbling mental capacity into the spotlight, Trump opened the door for the Democrats to substitute a more formidable foe. Fortunately for Trump, the leftists completely squandered the opportunity, railroading profoundly uncharismatic Kamala Harris into the presidential-nominee slot, and the rest is history.