New criticism is being directed at Jill Biden after a former senior aide accused her of attempting to reshape public perceptions of her reaction to President Biden’s widely criticized debate performance in 2024.
Michael LaRosa, who previously served as a spokesman for Jill Biden, said the former first lady appears to be revising her account of what she thought during the debate, after recently revealing that she feared her husband might be suffering a medical emergency while on stage.
According to LaRosa, the effort is aimed at altering how the public remembers both the debate and her response to it.
“They’re trying to change the tape in people’s minds about who she is… that’s why she’s sort of changing her tune a little bit about her reaction in real time,” LaRosa said. “She wants to say, ‘Oh no, my reaction was just as concerning and was just as severe as everyone at home. I was shocked.'”
LaRosa argued that Jill Biden effectively became the public face of the administration’s immediate response following the debate and suggested that a more candid reaction at the time would have resonated with voters.
He said she was “the face and the voice of the initial reaction for the country,” and that if she had reacted at the time with the sentiments she later shared with CBS, “it would have been a more human response.”
In the moments following the June 2024 debate, Jill Biden publicly praised her husband before a crowd of supporters.
“You did such a great job, you answered every question, you knew all the facts,” she said to then-President Biden in front of a crowd of cheering supporters following the debate in June 2024.
However, in an interview with CBS Sunday Morning that aired last week, she offered a dramatically different description of what she was thinking while watching the event unfold.
“I don’t know what happened. I mean, as I watched it, I thought, ‘Oh my God, he’s having a stroke.’ And it scared me to death,” she told CBS Sunday Morning in an interview that aired last week.
Republicans seized on Biden’s debate performance at the time as evidence that he was no longer fit to continue serving as commander in chief. Democrats, by contrast, largely insisted that the performance was an isolated incident rather than a reflection of a broader decline.
While Jill Biden’s recent remarks appeared to reinforce the argument that something unusual occurred that night, Axios reporter Alex Thompson challenged the notion that the debate performance was an isolated event.
Drawing on reporting conducted for the book Original Sin, which examines President Biden’s years in office, Thompson said aides had witnessed similar episodes on other occasions.
“Biden aides told Jake Tapper and me that they had seen him act that way before and after. Those moments became more difficult to predict and conceal,” Thompson said, referring to comments gathered during the writing of “Original Sin,” a book covering President Biden’s time in office.
{Matzav.com}
