Just when the Democrats thought they had put the headaches of the Biden administration behind them, Jill Biden is back with a vengeance.
The former first lady’s new book, View from the East Wing: A Memoir, hits shelves next week, but she sat down with CBS News for an interview set to air this weekend and the teasers are already dredging up some of the lowest moments of the 2024 campaign.
On Friday’s show, Megyn was joined by Jesse Kelly, host of The Jesse Kelly Show, to discuss Jill Biden’s return to the national stage and whether it is a middle finger to the party that forced her husband from power.
Dr. Jill’s Admission
Former President Joe Biden’s bumbling, slack-jawed performance at the June 2024 CNN debate against Donald Trump ended his political career. A few weeks later, he was pushed out as the Democrat nominee. A few weeks after that, he was officially replaced with Vice President Kamala Harris.
Anyone paying attention knew that the then-81 year old was not – and had not been – okay, but one of people most insistent that there was nothing to see there was none other than his wife, Jill Biden.
Moments after the debate concluded, the then-first lady was on stage to greet her husband and praise him like a small child. “You did such a great job,” she bellowed. “You answered every question.”
Flash forward to Jill’s media blitz for her new memoir and she has a very different take on the night. In an interview with Rita Braver for CBS Sunday Morning, she claimed she was “frightened” by her husband’s performance and thought he was having a stroke.
“Were you horrified as you saw it unfold,” Braver asks in a preview clip.
“I wasn’t horrified. I was frightened because I had never ever seen Joe like that before or since. Never,” Jill replied.
When Braver followed up on the claim that she has never seen her husband like that since, the former first lady doubled down. “Never, no,” she reiterated.
“Well, what happened,” Braver asked.
“I don’t know what happened,” the former first lady insisted before dropping a stunning recollection. “As I watched it, I thought, ‘Oh my god, he’s having a stroke,’ and it scared me to death.”
More Biden Lies
Megyn, for one, isn’t buying “Dr.” Jill’s diagnosis. “I submit, these are lies. She had seen him many, many times, and she did not think he was having a stroke. She knew this was par for the course,” Megyn said. “This is revisionist history to make her look less culpable on the cover-up.”
Kelly agreed. “Well, first of all, she is a Biden, and the Bidens, like all politicians, lie. Republicans lie, Democrats lie. You understand you are going to get some degree of lying with all politicians. That’s the way it’s always been,” he explained. “But in American politics, I have never found anybody who lies bigger than the Bidens lie, and I say that because they would tell gigantic, easily verifiable lies over and over and over again… For her to say she never saw him like that, it is just such a Biden lie. It is not just an obvious lie, it is a huge, obvious, in-your-face lie.”
With that premise in mind, Kelly said he has wondered whether the Bidens were just a political power couple who melted down as they saw said power slip away or something more sinister was at play. “Is she just a professional wife doing what he would have wanted, or just an evil witch, or somewhere in between,” he wondered.
“I am trying to figure out if they are just genuinely a power couple, and if young sober Joe Biden, who was in his right mind, if he wouldn’t want his wife to try to ram him through for a second term,” Kelly mused. “Maybe they are just a political power couple.”
Or maybe the former president’s best interests were not being considered. “My other side of this, where I go back and forth, is: Is she one of the most deeply evil human beings on the face of the planet? Because people going through dementia – if we’re going to call it that, if that’s what it actually is – they need rest and calm and care,” Kelly continued. “To take your own husband and throw him into the most stressful job on the planet and then demand that he run and do it again for four years [when] it would have killed him… She had to know that. They have all the best doctors in the world. She had to know that, yet she did it anyway.
The Legacy Factor
Regardless of what’s true, Kelly believes Jill remains “uniquely concerned” about her husband’s legacy, and this book and accompanying media tour is a desperate effort to repair the narrative.
“After he had that debate performance and the communists were trying to push him out so he wouldn’t run again… it came out that Jill Biden was insistent that he get another presidential term, otherwise – and this was her concern – that debate performance was going to be what people remember about Joe’s entire political career,” he noted. “And actually, she was not incorrect about that.”
While Kelly said he has no time for the forty-sixth president’s politics, he said you can’t deny the fact that, on paper, he had a long, successful career first as a U.S. senator, then as vice president of the United States, and then as president. “And yet most people are going to remember Joe Biden with his mouth hanging open, losing his train of thought,” Kelly said. “That is now going to be what people remember Joe Biden as, and that was part of her motivation.”
The Bidens’ Last Laugh
Another likely motivating factor? Revenge.
There is plenty of handwringing on the Dem side in the wake of the CBS Sunday Morning clip because, as Megyn explained, it brings up all the bad memories they have been trying to forget – especially heading into the midterms.
“I do wonder why she wrote [the book]. I guess it is the final fuck you to the Democrat Party, right? Because this is not helpful in any way to the Democrats. They don’t want to be discussing this,” Megyn said. “Right now, the Republican party is engaged in a circular firing squad and its leader has poll numbers that have fallen into the garbage as a result of the Iran war and inflation. [The Democrats] have been doing a very good job of keeping their mouth mouth shut to keep themselves out of the news cycle as everybody on Team Red hurts themselves. That is the smart move.”
And then came Jill. “Enter Jill Biden to bring the conversation back to their lowest moment in recent history and revive a debate that is unwinnable for Democrats,” Megyn said.
In Kelly’s view, the Democrats have no one to blame but themselves. “Jill Biden is obviously a ruthlessly ambitious individual who very much enjoyed the trappings of being first lady of the United States of America. She enjoyed the Vanity Fair covers. She enjoyed sitting there on Air Force One and going through binders… This is a woman who really, really enjoyed power and fought very hard to keep Joe Biden in power,” he explained. “Jill Biden was never going to retire quietly to Nantucket and take up quilting.”
“I still maintain to this day the Democrats really screwed up when they pushed Joe Biden out,” Kelly added. “They had to push him out, [but] they should have paid him off in some way. It would have had to be significant because you are asking the man to give up the presidency of the United States of America, but it should have come with more sugar cubes and less whip.”
He believes those “sugar cubes” should have been formulated for the former first lady specifically. “I’m sure they tried some sugar cubes, but Jill Biden should have walked out into a $10 million a year job,” Kelly continued. “Find a way to set them up with sugar cubes, so you don’t have this bitter, ambitious hag sitting at home with nothing better to do but fire off a book that screws Democrats over. They should have made her happy, they didn’t, and now you can get what you get and don’t throw a fit.”
You can check out Megyn’s full interview with Kelly by tuning in to episode 1,328 on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you like to listen. And don’t forget that you can catch The Megyn Kelly Show live on SiriusXM’s The Megyn Kelly Channel (channel 111) weekdays from 12pm to 2pm ET.