30As now-former President Joe Biden’s political future dimmed last year, his wife became a more assertive presence during his final days in the White House, according to a new book.
“2024: How Trump Retook the White House and the Democrats Lost America” was released Tuesday and touches on the power dynamics inside the Oval Office after Biden’s disastrous debate performance last June.
While then-GOP nominee Donald Trump ran circles around the sitting president, Biden appeared limited and never recovered politically.
The book claimed former First Lady Jill Biden was always a force in her husband’s administration, but grew more visible and influential during key political moments following the debate, after Democrats began to view her husband as a political liability.
As donors panicked and high-ranking Democrats called on him to drop his re-election bid, authors Josh Dawsey of The Wall Street Journal, Tyler Pager of The New York Times, and Isaac Arnsdor of The Washington Post describe Jill as having seized power in a vacuum.
According to Fox News reporter Deirdre Heavey, who read an advance copy of the book, Jill Biden and her chief of staff, Anthony Bernal, closed a tight circle around the then-president.
Access to Biden was limited as Jill Biden aggressively campaigned for a second term to donors and other influential Democratic Party officials.
At functions and during conversation, per the book, Jill Biden conveyed that with “her husband in the fight of his political life, Jill was making clear: The Democratic Party had to stick with Joe.”
She reportedly played the “role of the protective spouse, encouraging the president to eat vegetables, keeping him on time, and questioning staffers when she felt they erred.”
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When reporters probed her husband at a press conference after his first year in office in January 2022, a close aide reportedly asked Jill why the event was allowed to go on so long.
The former first lady had reportedly fostered such a tense environment that the aide apologized for asking the question.
Jill Biden also reportedly made it a point to attend and be visible at the federal trial of Hunter Biden, who faced prison time on gun charges.
She went as far as to attend a trial date with Hunter and a D-Day commemoration event in France in consecutive days to show the family was visible.
While Joe Biden vowed privately not to drop out of the race during a retreat to Camp David after the debate, Sam Adler-Bell with The New York Times wrote that the book describes how Democrats had already accepted the race was over.
As Biden remained adamant about facing Trump in the general election, “there was a view popular among some political insiders that this election had been over before it was started.”
Once Biden finally agreed to exit the race and put his weight behind now-former Vice President Kamala Harris, she was doomed.
Adler-Bell wrote Harris was “held back from the start by the slow-moving disaster that made it necessary in the first place.”
He concluded the book to be a “humorous account of the two-year campaign season that began when Donald Trump announced he was running for president again” and a “punishing read” for liberals.
For his part, Trump spoke to the book’s authors, dating back to the launch of his campaign.
A little more than a week before his inauguration, he told the authors, “The whole world was against me, and I won.”
It was not until after the election that legacy media reporters such as CNN’s Jake Tapper began to discuss Biden’s mental decline.
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