One of the best things about the end of a president’s term in office is supposed to be that we can stop pretending that we care about what their spouse has to say. With no monarchy — thank goodness — for some reason, here in the United States we instead nurture our bizarre penchant for celebrity by treating the people politicians happen to sleep with as somehow important.
But these days, it seems like they just won’t go away. First off, we have former first lady Michelle Obama oscillating between counting humongous mounds of cash and then complaining about how difficult her life is. But then there’s former first lady Jill Biden, who just resurfaced to remind us all not only how annoying she is but how much of a terrible wife she continues to be.
Yes, Jill Biden is now on a media tour, presumably to promote her latest book, View from the East Wing: A Memoir. It appears that she is staying in the world of fiction, with her two previously published works being Willow the White House Cat and Joey: The Story of Joe Biden. This time, Jill Biden explained to CBS News’ Rita Braver that then-President Joe Biden’s famous implosion during his presidential debate with Donald Trump in 2024 “frightened” her because she “had never ever seen Joe like that before or since.”
I’m sorry, I just don’t believe you. It is simply impossible to have paid any attention to Joe Biden from 2020 onward and think that he was just as sharp as the slimy-smooth talker who had grinned his way through Senate hearings and debates for decades previous.
But then came the real kicker: “I don’t know what happened,” she said. “As I watched it, I thought, ‘Oh, my God, he’s having a stroke.’ And it scared me to death.”
Let’s unpack that for a second, shall we? Imagine that you witness your elderly spouse having what you think is a stroke. That’s bad, right? After all, Jill Biden is a doctor! Such a good doctor, in fact, that The View’s Whoopi Goldberg suggested that she would make a wonderful surgeon general, despite the fact that Jill Biden is a doctor of education. Nonetheless, what would you do in Jill Biden’s position? Rush to your husband’s aid? Stop the debate immediately and call for medical assistance? Grab the nearest bottle of aspirin? Well, Jill Biden did none of those things. No, what she actually did was nothing, and instead kept watching her supposedly stroke-suffering husband from the sidelines.
There are two options here. First, she’s lying. Of course, this is hardly difficult to imagine, given that she responded to Joe Biden’s disastrous performance by claiming at the time that he was “sharp as ever.” Second, she actually thought that Joe Biden was having a stroke, and yet cared far more about keeping the Biden-family gravy train moving at all costs, even if it killed her husband.
Folks, neither of those options is good.
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Some may remember that I wrote on this very subject back in February 2023 — when Joe Biden was still “sharp as ever” — and pointed out that Jill Biden was among a class of politically motivated women who were failing their husbands in their fundamental duty as a loving spouse.
And it seems like she’s just as terrible as ever.
Ian Haworth is a syndicated columnist. You can find his work on Substack.