Jill Biden said that moments after the June 27, 2024 presidential debate in Atlanta, doctors checked President Joe Biden and told her he was “fine,” after she feared he had suffered a stroke. The Biden administration previously said doctors examined him “days”
When the presidential debate ended in Atlanta on June 27, 2024, Jill Biden remembers the feeling as quickly as she remembers the sequence of what came next.
“We got off the stage,” Biden told NPR’s Scott Detrow on the Newsmakers podcast. She said she went to retrieve her belongings, while President Joe Biden met back up with his group. Then. she described. they reconvened in the car and doctors checked him out—so soon after the moment onstage that she wondered whether something physical had gone wrong.
“They doctors, you know, checked him out and said, ‘Oh, he’s fine,’” Jill Biden said. In her account of that night, she said her husband’s disastrous performance made her wonder whether he was having a “stroke.”
The details Jill Biden provided clash with what the Biden administration had previously said publicly. The administration had told reporters that doctors examined the president “days” following the debate—not moments after.
In her memoir. View from the East Wing. Jill Biden said she had few answers for what caused the debate performance she called “inexplicable.” Speaking again to Detrow. she described the question as one she still cannot fully answer even with time passed. “When people say to me, ‘What happened in that moment?’ … I don’t know,” Biden said. “I mean, I don’t know what happened.”.
Biden also pushed back on the idea that the performance was part of a broader pattern. She denied that anyone had warned her privately that the president was not “a one-off” case on debate night. “No one came to me and said that,” she said, responding to reports that quoted former staffers.
Not long after that night, Jill Biden’s political world shifted. She said shortly after the debate that her husband bowed out of the presidential race. Former Vice President Kamala Harris then took up the Democratic nomination and lost the election to President Trump.
Jill Biden’s remarks on what happened inside the campaign also arrived as the relationship between the Bidens and Harris remains under strain. In Harris’s own memoir, 107 Days, she criticized the Bidens for questioning her loyalty and their handling of the 2024 campaign. When Detrow asked Jill Biden about Harris and the wider White House story in the interview released Thursday. Jill Biden confirmed one piece of the internal calculus around Biden’s decision-making.
She said President Biden had planned to serve only one term at the start. “Originally. he thought. you know. just like you’re saying. ‘I’m going to do four years and get out. ’” Biden told Detrow. But she said the momentum of the midterms—and the advice that followed—changed the trajectory. “But then… Everybody kept saying, ‘You’ve got to… The midterms were good. We’ve got to keep going.’ … And so that’s why he made the decision to keep running.”.
The memoir and the interview also returned to the personal cost of the campaign’s final stretch. When asked if she would have done anything differently, Jill Biden said she regretted the hurt her family endured.
“So to look back, I wouldn’t want anybody to go through that,” Biden said. “No, I never want to go through that again.”
Jill Biden Joe Biden Trump debate stroke fear doctors checked June 27 2024 Atlanta View from the East Wing Kamala Harris 107 Days NPR Newsmakers
So they checked him “moments after” but before it was “days”? ok sure.
Not to be dramatic but that’s a huge timeline difference. If it was days later then why is she saying moments after like right away? Sounds like they’re rewriting the story depending on what people ask.
I thought a stroke would’ve been obvious tho… like wouldn’t somebody notice on stage? Or maybe she panicked and they said “fine” cause they didn’t want to worry everyone. Also she says she still doesn’t know what happened like come on.
This is why nobody believes any of it. First it’s “days” then it’s “moments.” Meanwhile Trump debate night energy was wild anyway so people are gonna blame everything on a stroke or whatever. I’m not saying that’s true, I’m just saying the excuses keep changing.