Skip to main content

Jill Biden says she feared Joe Biden was having a stroke during disastrous 2024 debate

WASHINGTON (AP) — Jill Biden feared her husband was having a stroke as she watched then-President Joe Biden stumble through a disastrous debate performance that led to the end of his 2024 reelection campaign, the former first lady said in a recent interview.

“I was frightened, because I had never ever seen Joe like that before or since. Never,” Jill Biden told CBS News in an interview scheduled to air Sunday.

Joe Biden’s shaky, mumbling and sometimes confused delivery against Donald Trump in June 2024 gave fuel to questions voters already had about his fitness for a second term. His attempts to explain away his performance and offer reassurance that he could handle four more years of the demanding job did little to assuage voters. Under mounting pressure from within his party, he stepped aside, and Democrats nominated Vice President Kamala Harris.

“I don’t know what happened,” Jill Biden said in the interview. “As I watched it, I thought, ‘Oh, my God, he’s having a stroke.’ And it scared me to death.”

The former first lady is promoting a book due out next week, “View from the East Wing: A Memoir.”

How Voodoo overcame suppression and became a democratic force in the West African nation of Benin

OUIDAH, Benin (AP) — Democracy came to the cradle of Voodoo religion in 1991, when Benin’s military dictator of many years surprisingly lost an election that he had organized. Mathieu Kérékou had amassed power partly by banning the practice of so-called sorcerers, whose authority he deemed subversive to his own. Voodooists would have the last laugh. The opposition figure who defeated Kérékou, Nicéphore Soglo, rehabilitated Voodoo, or Vodún as it is known in Benin, as part of national heritage and emphasized the kind of tolerance that Kérékou would try to emulate when he successfully sought reelection in 1996. Two decades and three presidents later, this West African nation is a bastion of democracy in a region dubbed “the coup belt” for the trend since 2020 of military takeovers. President Romuald Wadagni was inaugurated on May 24 to replace Patrice Talon, who stepped down after serving two terms.
Read Next Story

Related News

Democrat Angela Gonzales-Torres advances to the general election for U.S. House in California’s 34th Congressional District

Larry Rhoden advances to Republican primary runoff election for governor in South Dakota

Republican Armen Kurdian advances to the general election for U.S. House in California’s 49th Congressional District