Last week, news outlets began reporting on excerpts from Jill Biden's forthcoming memoir, and they've caused quite a stir. Her version of events during Joe Biden's botched debate with President Donald Trump, and her account of Kamala Harris after Biden dropped out of the race, have generated headlines. But the excerpts are also getting attention for being… let’s just say, less than truthful. This is actually a common theme with the stories told by the Bidens, who clearly aren't very good at passing off fiction as fact.
How bad is it? Let's just say the receipts are everywhere.
Jill Biden told CBS News in a Sunday Morning interview that aired last week that she was absolutely terrified watching Joe perform during his disastrous June 2024 debate. "I don't know what happened. I mean, as I watched it, I thought, 'Oh my God, he's having a stroke.' And it scared me to death," she said.
As we pointed out here at PJ Media, her current claim clashed with the facts. Right after that debate, Jill Biden walked onto that stage and told her husband, in front of cheering supporters, "You did such a great job, you answered every question, you knew all the facts." That's not a woman who thought her husband was having a stroke. That's a woman who was managing a narrative.
Her former spokesman, Michael LaRosa, noticed the discrepancy too. "They're trying to change the tape in people's minds about who she is," LaRosa said. "That's why she's sort of changing her tune a little bit about her reaction in real time." He argued that Jill was "the face and the voice of the initial reaction for the country" that night, and that a more candid expression of alarm would have read as genuinely human. Instead, she chose reassurance. Now, nearly two years later, she wants credit for the alarm she never showed.
Related: Jill Biden Is Trying to Rewrite History About Joe's Cancer Diagnosis
"She wants to say, 'Oh no, my reaction was just as concerning and was just as severe as everyone at home. I was shocked,’” LaRosa said. The problem is that people watched what she actually did. Social media had plenty to say about the gap between her current story and her post-debate performance on that stage.
Meanwhile, Axios reporter Alex Thompson, who co-wrote the book Original Sin, reported that Biden aides told him and Jake Tapper they had witnessed Joe act exactly the way he did during that debate both before and after the night in question. Those troubling episodes, Thompson wrote, "became more difficult to predict and conceal." In other words, the people closest to Biden knew. They just didn't tell the rest of us.
Of course, Jill didn't invent the Biden family tradition of bending the truth.
As PJ Media readers know, Joe has a long, well-documented record of fabricating and exaggerating elements of his own biography, recycling debunked stories as if sheer repetition could transform them into fact. Heck, even to the point where, in his impaired brain, he may have even started to believe them.
Take his son, Beau, who died from brain cancer in 2015. Biden has invoked Beau's memory repeatedly when speaking with the families of fallen servicemembers, including, by multiple accounts, when he met with families of the 13 Americans killed in the Kabul airport attack during the catastrophic Afghanistan withdrawal. Over time, his references grew increasingly blurred, until Biden was claiming in October that Beau "lost his life in Iraq." He didn't. He died of cancer at Walter Reed.
Then there's the story Biden loves to tell about having an "epiphany" as a teenager that made him a champion of gay rights. The problem is, that history tells a very different story. As a senator, he opposed gay people working in the federal government, arguing they posed a security risk. He also supported "Don't Ask, Don't Tell,” and voted for the Defense of Marriage Act. Even as vice president, he opposed civil unions for same-sex couples.
The pattern is consistent, and it runs deep. Joe spent decades lying about his past to build a political brand. Jill is now lying about the recent past to salvage what’s left of his legacy. If there’s even anything left to salvage.
The Bidens have treated the American public as an audience to be managed rather than citizens who deserve the truth. The Bidens have always believed that if you tell a story confidently enough and often enough, people will eventually stop checking and just believe it.
