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WASHINGTON — Jill Biden declared her husband Joe is a “hero” for dropping out of the 2024 presidential race and insisted it was his advisers who wanted him to run for a second term.
In an interview with The Jamie Kern Lima Show, the former first lady didn’t directly answer whether she was the “Lady McBeth” who pushed Joe Biden to spend four more years in the White House and instead laid the blame at the feet of their long-serving staff.
She confirmed that Biden, 83, originally intended to serve only one term as president but claimed, after Republicans had a poor showing in the 2022 midterms, Democratic Party members and his own advisers said he needed to run for re-election.
“After the midterms occurred and we won the midterms, and how you know the Democrats were doing so well, and everybody was coming to Joe and to me and saying, ‘He’s got to keep going,’” she said. “His advisors were saying that. People were saying that everywhere, out on the road. He has to run.”
Republicans underperformed in the 2022 midterm election, winning a scant majority in the House and failing to take the Senate. Biden, as president and leader of the party, was credited with a successful election.
But Donald Trump, planning his 2024 presidential bid, continued to raise questions about Biden’s health. And that issue jumped to the forefront after Biden’s disastrous debate performance in June 2024, where he fumbled for answers and stammered through his responses.
In the aftermath, members of his own party turned against him until, on July 21, 2024, Biden announced he would step down as the party’s nominee.
Jill Biden said she hoped the “true story” of what happened in those years would come out in the historical record and said she wants her husband remembered as a “hero.”
“People forget that historical context because of all the negative overlay, they forget the true story- of what happened,” she said. “And I’m hoping that it’s revealed in history – and that becomes Joe’s legacy.”
She criticized “negative” people who disparaged the Biden family. “People just put whatever twist on it that they want, and mostly it’s negative.”
The decision to leave the race was Joe’s and his alone, she noted.
“Joe, I think, saw the direction that things were going, and he decided to step aside. I mean, I thought what he did was heroic. I mean, he gave up everything,” she noted.
She said she declined to give any advice on what to do when Joe asked for it, telling him: “I said, ‘You make this decision yourself.’ I said. ‘Whatever decision is made, you have to be able to live with it the rest of your life.’ And I said, ‘I am not going to weigh in for or against.’ And I kept true to that.”
During Biden’s four years in the White House, there was chatter Jill Biden was running operations and covering up for her husband’s declining health. Congressional Republicans — as part of an investigation into Biden’s mental fitness and decision-making while in office — subpoenaed several of the couple’s top aides and the former president’s doctor. Many of them pleaded the Fifth Amendment.
Jill Biden also revealed the couple’s personal conversation in bed that night, after Joe announced his decision to step down as nominee: “He grabbed my hand, and he said, ‘Jilly, I had no choice.’ And so, you know, he had to step aside.”
The former president will give his side of the story when his memoir, “Promise Me, America,” comes out on Nov. 17.
In the announcement of the book, he hinted that he will work to reshape his controversial legacy.
“It’s about the challenges we face as a nation, about the decisions I made and why I made them,” Joe Biden said.
And Jill Biden revealed in her interview that she’s writing another book, this one focused on health and aging.
“I wanna talk about health and aging, longevity, because I don’t feel that we have a true sense of, as we age, um, is this normal?” she said, saying the tome will focus on “what’s normal and what’s not normal.”
English (US)