By Joe Concha
This piece originally appeared in The Washington Examiner
Jill Biden‘s current book tour may very well be dead on arrival. Despite multiple book tour interviews on national networks leading up to the launch, her memoir, View From The East Wing, is currently not even ranked on Amazon’s top 50 best sellers.
For a former first lady with that kind of exposure, that ain’t good.
Biden appeared remarkably unprepared for what should have been a series of friendly softball interviews, including sit-downs on CBS’s Sunday Morning and NBC’s Today. Questions she absolutely had to know were coming were met with disingenuous, almost delusional responses.
Here’s what she says she was thinking during her husband’s debate performance against Donald Trump on June 27, 2024: “I was frightened, because I had never ever seen Joe like that before or since. Never,” she told CBS News. “I don’t know what happened. As I watched it, I thought, ‘Oh, my God, he’s having a stroke.’ And it scared me to death.”
The stroke concern was understandable, which begs the question: Why didn’t she seek immediate medical attention? Instead, she paraded him into a midnight rally at a Waffle House with dozens of press cameras rolling.
From there, she proceeded to praise the president the way an elementary school teacher praises a young student after winning a spelling bee.
“Joe, you did such a great job! You answered every question! You knew all the facts!” she exclaimed to cheers from the crowd.
It’s one thing for the then-first lady to praise the president publicly at the time. But it’s quite another to encourage him behind the scenes to stay in the race. In theory, a Biden victory in 2024 would have meant him being in office until January 2029 at age 86.
But there was no way Joe Biden was winning his rematch against Trump. All six major polls the week leading up to his dropping out had Trump leading. Every swing state also had Trump leading relatively comfortably, especially in Pennsylvania, Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, and North Carolina. And as we know, polls underestimate Trump’s support. If Joe Biden had stayed in, he may have fared worse than his vice president, Kamala Harris, and that’s really saying something.
Yet on Tuesday morning, during an interview with MS Now, Jill Biden still insisted her husband would have won despite him seemingly diminishing by the day and his approval languishing in the 30s leading up to his exit from the race.
“Does he believe he would have beaten Donald Trump in that election?” Morning Joe’s Willie Geist asked.
“I believe he would’ve beat Donald Trump in that election,” she promptly replied.
More than anyone on the planet, Jill Biden was exposed to the behavior of her spouse of nearly five decades. And if she saw what many of us have been observing publicly since the 2019 Democratic primaries regarding mental decline and still wanted to be in office for another four years, that’s marital malpractice. It also would have put the country at risk, and it already likely did from a national security perspective.
“What if [Joe Biden’s debate episode] had happened during a meeting with foreign leaders or something?” CBS News correspondent Rita Braver asked Jill Biden on Sunday.
“I don’t know how to answer that,” she replied.
Well, that’s reassuring.
For the Democratic Party, this book tour is reminding voters again of all the lies and deceit, ranging from Joe Biden’s inner circle to his campaign surrogates who attempted the biggest cover-up of the 21st century, which could not come at a worse time.
Just look back on how May was for Democrats.
Senate candidate Graham Platner’s campaign is imploding. In addition to once having a Nazi tattoo for nearly two decades before removing it when he got into the political arena, Platner’s social media posts are a disaster. It will be a miracle if Platner survives to make it to the general election against Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME), as his own party is beginning to turn on him. It’s basically Eric Swalwell all over again.
Other May lowlights for Democrats include the 2024 “autopsy,” the redistricting debacle in Virginia, and their go-to late-night host and advocate, Stephen Colbert, going off the air after CBS decided that losing $40 million annually was not good for business.
And now, the book tour by Jill Biden is dominating the news cycle for all the wrong reasons.
“We don’t need to be distracted by what the DNC says about the autopsy,” Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham (D-NM) told reporters at a Democratic National Committee meeting in Washington recently. “I don’t need to be distracted about anyone’s book. What I need to do is to focus on making a difference in the lives of people. And that’s what I think they’re getting really frustrated about, is all this nonsense.”
But the Bidens will do what’s best for the Bidens. They always have. Maybe it’s the money. Maybe it’s a perpetual need to stay relevant. Or maybe it’s a futile attempt to rewrite history regarding the worst presidency of our lifetimes.
