Jill Biden recently said her husband’s disastrous 2024 debate performance frightened her so badly that she wondered if he was having a stroke.
The former first lady says she’d never seen her husband like that “before or since.” But for many Americans, the political damage was not simply the debate itself, it was the feeling that legitimate concerns about President Joe Biden’s age and acuity had long been brushed aside or minimized by Democratic leaders and their allies.
Democrats cannot move forward politically until they are honest with themselves and the public about why Donald Trump won in 2024, as we recently wrote
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.DNC Chairman Ken Martin’s refusal for many months to release the party’s own postmortem on that defeat spoke to a deeper reluctance to confront uncomfortable realities about how badly voter trust eroded during the Biden presidency. No issue damaged that trust more than the widening gap between what Americans were seeing from Joe Biden in unscripted moments and how many Democratic leaders and allies covered for him.
The months-long internal party argument over whether to make the autopsy public — Martin finally acquiesced last month, apologizing for creating a needless distraction, and then felt compelled to fire the report’s author after it turned out to be embarrassingly thin gruel — underscored the lingering distrust from the Biden years and made it seem as if nothing had changed. The damage of appearing to have something to hide was far greater than the damage of producing a nothingburger analysis.
Long before the 2024 debate, videos of Biden freezing, wandering or speaking unclearly had fueled public concerns about his age and acuity.
But the public was repeatedly told not to believe its own eyes. In their zeal to defeat Trump, some among the media and plenty of Democrats portrayed legitimate critiques of Biden’s fitness as bad-faith partisan attacks.
In doing so, they helped create the conditions that made Trump’s return possible.
“How Much Do Voters Really Care About Biden’s Age?” read one 2023 headline in The New York Times. That framing reflected a broader tendency among Democratic-aligned voices to treat concerns about Biden’s age as exaggerated or politically motivated. CNBC ran an article in February 2024 titled, “Biden is a ‘healthy, active, robust 81-year-old male,’ his doctor says after physical.” It had been running similar articles meant to reinforce Biden’s fitness for office for months.
To be fair, some reporters and outlets did raise persistent questions about Biden’s age and acuity before the debate. But within much of Democratic politics and elite media discourse, those concerns were often treated as unfair, exaggerated or rooted in partisan manipulation.
That was no longer an option after the disastrous debate.
The disconnect between what Americans were told and what they could see plainly proved especially damaging for an administration that had explicitly framed itself as a restoration of honesty, normalcy and truth after Trump’s first term.
Many Americans began to wonder: If they’re lying about this, can we trust them on anything at all?
CNN’s Jake Tapper co-authored a 2025 book — “Original Sin” — acknowledging that he and others in the media failed to adequately report on Biden’s obvious decline.
Comedian Jon Stewart knocked Tapper’s network for promoting a book “about news they should’ve told you was news a year ago for free.” Exactly.
One might have thought the Biden story was old news, but Jill Biden’s comments have revived it, much to party leaders’ chagrin, we’re sure. But perhaps there’s a silver lining.
The Democrats have a fresh opportunity to fully acknowledge that they broke the trust of the American people and, while doing so, to pledge they’ll never repeat the mistake.
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