Former first lady Jill Biden is asking history to remember her husband as a “hero” for ending his 2024 reelection campaign. But as PJ Media notes, the internet has kept receipts that make that characterization a tough sell.
In an interview with The Jamie Kern Lima Show, Jill Biden said she hopes the “true story” of what happened during her husband’s presidency will emerge in the historical record. She described Joe Biden’s decision to drop out of the race as “heroic,” saying he “gave up everything.”
A Different Story in June 2024
The problem, according to the column, is that Jill Biden’s current account clashes sharply with her own public statements during the 2024 campaign. On June 27, 2024, Americans watched Joe Biden deliver a halting, stumbling debate performance against Donald Trump that triggered widespread alarm within the Democratic Party.
Nearly two years later, Jill Biden admitted to CBS News that she was “frightened” watching that debate. “As I watched it, I thought, ‘Oh, my God, he’s having a stroke,'” she told CBS’s Rita Braver. “And it scared me to death.”
But minutes after helping her husband off the debate stage, Jill Biden told supporters, “You did such a great job. You answered every question. You knew all the facts.” Supporters responded with chants of “four more years.”
The contrast is stark. If she genuinely feared a stroke, PJ Media’s David Manney wrote, calling the performance “such a great job” was “one heck of a postgame assessment.”
‘I Am All In Too’
Her support didn’t waver in the days that followed. On July 8, 2024, Jill Biden told supporters her husband was “all in” and added, “I am all in too.” She promised voters that with four more years, Joe Biden would “continue to fight for you.”
Joe Biden remained in the race until July 21, 2024, dropping out amid crumbling Democratic support. He was the first sitting president to withdraw from a reelection race since Lyndon B. Johnson in 1968.
Now: ‘No Choice’
In the recent interview, Jill Biden told a different story. She said her husband’s decision to run and later to exit the race were both entirely his own. She recalled Joe taking her hand the night he decided to leave and saying, “Jilly, I had no choice.”
She said she refused to weigh in on the decision, telling her husband, “You make this decision yourself.” She claimed she kept true to that promise.
In her defense, her account has some support. Interviews with Biden’s senior staff later showed many advisers favored another run. Jill Biden also cited the 2022 midterms, when Democrats performed better than expected, as a reason party figures pressed her husband to seek a second term.
The Historical Record
But Manney argues that Jill Biden doesn’t get to hand her share of the decision to the staff and advisers, particularly when her own words remain publicly available.
“We watched the debate. We watched Jill praise him afterward. We hear ‘four more years.’ We heard ‘all in.’ We watched Joe stay put until Democrats finally made continued resistance politically untenable,” he wrote.
As for the “heroic” framing, the timeline is hard to square. Joe Biden’s exit came only after Democratic support had crumbled and party leaders publicly pushed for his withdrawal. In Jill Biden’s own telling, her husband believed he “had no choice.”
“She can even keep wearing whatever portion of the White House drapery collection followed her home,” Manney quipped. “What she can’t do is rewrite 2024 while the video is still online.”
Source: pjmedia.com — https://pjmedia.com/david-manney/2026/08/26/jill-biden-calls-joe-a-hero-too-bad-the-internet-kept-the-receipts-n4956577
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