BS BULLETIN:
- Jill Biden was asked whether someone could have “laced” Joe Biden’s drink before his disastrous 2024 debate. Her answer: “Who knows? Who knows?”
- Jill says doctors determined Joe had not suffered a stroke, but she still has no definitive explanation for what happened that night.
- At the time, Jill publicly told Joe he had done “such a great job.” She now admits she was privately frightened and thought he might be having a stroke.
Nearly two years after Joe Biden’s catastrophic debate with Donald Trump detonated his reelection campaign, Americans have apparently graduated from “he had a cold” to “perhaps somebody slipped him something.”
Former first lady Jill Biden appeared Thursday on The Jamie Kern Lima Show and once again acknowledged that she still cannot explain what happened to her husband on that stage in Atlanta.
Asked whether doctors had ruled out a stroke that night, Jill said they had. But when host Jamie Kern Lima floated another possibility — whether somebody might have “laced his drink or something” — Jill did not dismiss it. “Who knows? Who knows?” she replied.
To be clear, Jill offered no evidence that Joe Biden was drugged, and there is no publicly established evidence that anyone tampered with anything he consumed. What is remarkable is that the former first lady herself is now willing to entertain the theory while continuing to say she has no idea what caused the bizarre performance that changed the course of the 2024 election. “I know he was tired, he didn’t feel well that day,” Jill said, explaining that she had been traveling herself and had only seen her husband about an hour before the debate. She said medical personnel were around the Bidens constantly and examined him afterward, finding him medically OK.
That is a much different picture from the tidy explanation Americans were handed in real time. The White House explanation after the June 27, 2024 debate was essentially that Biden was suffering from a cold.
Jill now writes in her memoir, View from the East Wing, that as she watched him struggle, she thought: “Is this a stroke?” and even wondered privately whether he had been drugged. She described the man onstage as seeming almost like a malfunctioning version of the husband she knew. And herein lies the rather enormous problem.
Because immediately after apparently fearing that the sitting president of the United States might be suffering a neurological emergency, Jill Biden walked onto a campaign stage and told him: “Joe, you did such a great job. You answered every question. You knew all the facts.”
That clip has aged about as gracefully as warm milk.
Jill later admitted she has wondered whether the family and campaign made a mistake by trying to reassure voters instead of simply acknowledging the obvious — that Biden looked profoundly unwell. In her memoir, she writes that there was never a sufficiently convincing explanation for the debate and that the unanswered questions never disappeared.
No kidding.
The public had spent months being told Biden was sharp, capable and perfectly able to serve another four-year term. Then roughly 51 million television viewers watched him freeze, lose his train of thought and famously declare, “We finally beat Medicare.” The fallout was immediate. Democrats panicked, donors rebelled, lawmakers began demanding Biden withdraw, and less than a month later he abandoned his reelection campaign and endorsed Kamala Harris.
Now some of the people closest to Biden are themselves revisiting exactly the questions voters were chastised for asking. That includes Jill, whose memoir tour has reportedly irritated former Biden aides. Axios reported earlier this summer that some veterans of Biden world were frustrated by her decision to reopen the debate controversy, with one former aide complaining that the people closest to Biden were now doing the most damage to his legacy.
Former Biden spokesman Andrew Bates similarly questioned why such a painful episode needed to be dredged up again while Democrats are trying to move forward. But Jill keeps dredging.
And every time she does, the official history of the Biden presidency becomes a little harder to square with what Americans were originally told.
MY QUICK TAKE
At this pace, by Christmas we’re going to find out Colonel Mustard did it in the CNN green room with a bottle of NyQuil.
Nobody has produced a shred of evidence that Joe Biden was drugged, so let’s not turn speculation into fact. But the fact that Jill Biden herself will not simply say “No, that didn’t happen” is astonishing.
Especially because the much bigger scandal has been sitting in plain sight since debate night. The same woman who now tells us she was looking at Joe thinking, My God, is my husband having a stroke? marched onto the stage afterward and congratulated him like he had just won Jeopardy! “Joe! You answered every question!”
Ma’am, apparently you weren’t even sure he knew what planet he was on.
And remember what happened to anyone who suggested before that debate that Biden’s condition might be considerably worse than the White House was admitting. They were conspiracy theorists. Ageists. Cheap-fake merchants. MAGA propagandists.
Now the conspiracy theories are apparently being workshopped inside the Biden family.
DBS WIRE SOURCES:
- Fox News — Jill Biden entertains possibility Joe was drugged before debate, asked point blank if doctors ruled out stroke
- New York Post — Jill Biden entertains possibility Joe was drugged before 2024 debate with Trump
- People — Jill Biden reacts to conspiracy theory that Joe was drugged before disastrous 2024 debate performance: ‘Who knows, right?’
- Mediaite — ‘Who knows?’ Jill Biden fosters conspiracy theory that Joe could have been drugged before disastrous debate
- Associated Press — In new memoir, Jill Biden wonders whether acknowledging Joe’s poor debate would have been better
- CBS News — Jill Biden says she thought Joe Biden was ‘having a stroke’ during 2024 debate
