Jill Biden breaks silence on Joe’s exit from 2024 Presidential run
Jill Biden has opened up about the night her husband decided to abandon his re-election bid, revealing he grabbed her hand and told her, ‘Jilly, I had no choice.’
The former first lady shared the intimate detail during a sit-down with The Jamie Kern Lima Show, where she also pushed back on the idea that she was the driving force behind Joe Biden's decision to seek a second term in the first place.
Asked whether she was one of the main players asking her husband to step down from the race, the 83-year-old president's wife didn't give a straight answer.
Instead, she pointed the finger at the couple's longtime staff and advisers, insisting the push to run again came from them, not her.
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Why did Joe Biden decide to run for a second term?
According to Jill Biden, her husband never planned on serving more than four years in the Oval Office. That changed, she said, once the Democrats defied expectations in the 2022 midterms, when Republicans failed to flip the Senate and only narrowly took control of the House.
She described being swarmed with encouragement to keep her husband in the race.
"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."
That momentum didn't last. Donald Trump spent much of his own 2024 campaign questioning Biden's fitness for office, and those doubts exploded into the open after Biden's widely panned debate performance in June 2024, where he repeatedly lost his train of thought.
Support from within his own party collapsed in the weeks that followed, and on July 21, 2024, Biden withdrew from the race.
Jill Biden told the podcast she hopes history eventually tells the 'true story' of that period, and that her husband is ultimately remembered as a 'hero' rather than defined by the fallout.
She was also critical of commentators who, in her view, twisted the narrative unfairly. "People just put whatever twist on it that they want, and mostly it's negative," she said, adding that stepping aside was ultimately her husband's call alone. "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 also recalled refusing to weigh in when Joe asked for her opinion on whether to continue his campaign, telling him the choice had to be his to live with.
Throughout his presidency, speculation swirled that Jill Biden had taken on a larger behind-the-scenes role while shielding concerns about her husband's health, claims serious enough that congressional Republicans subpoenaed several of the couple's closest aides, along with the former president's physician, during a probe into his mental sharpness in office.
A number of those subpoenaed invoked their Fifth Amendment rights.
Is Jill Biden writing a new book?
Away from politics, Jill Biden confirmed she's working on a new book centered on aging and long-term health.
"I wanna talk about health and aging, longevity, because I don't feel that we have a true sense of, as we age, is this normal?" she explained, adding it would explore 'what's normal and what's not normal.'
Joe Biden, meanwhile, is set to release his own memoir, Promise Me, America, on November 17, which he's said will lay out 'the challenges we face as a nation, about the decisions I made and why I made them.'
Thomas Bamford