In new memoir, Jill Biden wonders whether acknowledging Joe's poor debate would have been better

WASHINGTON (AP) — In her new memoir, former first lady Jill Biden reflects on former President Joe Biden's poor debate performance against Donald Trump nearly two years ago and wonders whether it would have been better to acknowledge it rather than reassure supporters afterward.

The Democrat's performance ultimately proved to be his undoing as he campaigned for reelection, amplifying concerns about whether the then-81-year-old could serve a second term. He ultimately dropped his bid under pressure from within his party and endorsed his vice president, Kamala Harris, who lost to the Republican Trump.

In “View from the East Wing,” a memoir about her White House years that's being published next Tuesday, she said she still doesn’t know why her husband performed so disastrously that day.

The Associated Press obtained a copy of the book's 274-page manuscript, which includes her first public comments about the debate and the ensuing chain of events that sent Joe Biden back to private life in Delaware sooner than he had envisioned.

The book also covers his prostate cancer diagnosis after leaving office and their son Hunter's federal trial on gun charges, among other issues during Joe Biden's term, along with how she juggled the added responsibilities of being first lady and her teaching career.

Here are some highlights from the book:

Jill Biden writes that her husband “looked bleary” in their hotel suite in Atlanta before the debate. She was confident he would do well, she said, because big events energized him. But when the CNN-sponsored event began, “I immediately noticed that Joe didn't look good. He didn't seem himself from the opening.”

A few minutes in, he said something out of turn about how “we finally beat Medicare.”

“Is he short-circuiting? I thought,” she wrote. “Is this a stroke? It felt like we were watching an AI hologram of the man we knew, and the hologram was glitching.”

She wondered if he had been drugged or was experiencing a medical emergency.

He improved as the debate went on, “but not enough to reassure me or anyone watching that he was okay. He clearly wasn't,” Jill Biden said. “I'd never seen that look on his face before in my life.”

As they walked offstage afterward, he used colorful language to whisper to her that he had messed up, which she took as a “sign of his having returned to himself.”

But "to this day, I still don't know what happened," she wrote. They attended a post-debate rally and dropped in at a Waffle House before traveling to North Carolina for a next-day appearance.

The official explanation at the time from the White House and others close to the president was that he was suffering from a cold. But Jill Biden said she wonders if they should have acknowledged what millions of people saw — “that he looked very unwell in that debate.”

“The biggest lesson for us, I think, was that if you don't explain something well enough then the question won't go away,” she wrote. “There was never a satisfying enough explanation offered for Joe's debate performance, and a lot of people never got over it.”

Biden’s performance in the debate crystallized the concerns of many voters that he was too old to continue serving as president. It sparked a fresh round of calls for him to consider stepping aside as the party’s nominee as fellow Democrats feared a Trump return to the White House if Biden remained as their candidate.

The drumbeat of calls for him to leave the race started before the debate had ended and, “in the days to come, it would grow louder and louder,” Jill Biden wrote.

Jill Biden reveals that while she was first lady, she was terminated by the school where she had taught English and writing since 2009. She had signed her annual contract in July 2023, and a termination letter signed by the college president was hand-delivered that winter.

The grant used to pay her salary had dried up.

“I felt sick,” she wrote. “I was hosting holiday parties at the White House, so I had to go from seeing emails about my firing to groups of children belting out ’Jingle Bells.'”

Ultimately, the issue was resolved — she did not say how —- “and I kept my position.”

But she taught her last class at the school in December 2024, wrapping up a 40-year career as an educator. She wrote in the book that she's exploring an opportunity to teach GED classes at an undisclosed women's prison.

People in Washington sent her photos of the demolition and she said, “I could barely look.”

The East Wing was the historic base of operations for first ladies and their staffs, the social office, the military office and other operations. Trump had it torn down last year to build a ballroom.

“A major landmark and historic treasure was being treated like an extreme fixer-upper on HGTV’s ‘Property Brothers,’” she wrote, adding that what “pained me” was “the symbolic bulldozing of history and the eradication of institutional memory.”

She noticed that Biden started waking up repeatedly in the middle of the night in the year before they left the White House. She alerted his doctors and urged him to see a urologist.

About four months after leaving office, in May 2025, he was diagnosed with stage IV prostate cancer that had spread to his bones. Biden underwent daily radiation treatment for five and a half weeks and takes hormone pills that can cause him to become fatigued and moody.

“But we couldn't dwell in the grief because we were put immediately on the defensive, accused of having hidden his illness,” she wrote.

The White House has a doctor's office and presidents have access to the best medical care.

“Joe couldn't stub his toe without 10 people wanting to run at him waving bales of gauze," she wrote. “You put the president in bubble wrap, and he ends up with stage IV prostate cancer? It made no sense.”

Shortly before that fateful debate, Hunter Biden had been convicted of all three felony charges related to the purchase of a revolver in 2018 when, prosecutors argued, he lied on a mandatory gun-purchase form by saying he was not illegally using or addicted to drugs.

The family was surprised the case went to trial and viewed it as politically motivated.

While Joe Biden had vowed that he wouldn't pardon his son if he were convicted, the former first lady saw things differently.

“In the end, it felt like in working so hard to be impartial, we guaranteed that Hunter would meet the worst possible legal fate," she wrote. "Joe might have gone too far, in my opinion, to show that his family was being treated with complete impartiality.”

But during his final weeks in office, Biden issued pardons for Hunter, sparing him a possible prison sentence, and for Biden's siblings and their spouses, fearing they might become targets of the incoming Trump administration.

FILE - Hunter Biden, President Joe Biden's son, accompanied by his mother, first lady Jill Biden and his wife, Melissa Cohen Biden, walks out of federal court after hearing the verdict, June 11, 2024, in Wilmington, Del. Hunter Biden has been convicted of all 3 felony charges in the federal gun trial. (AP Photo/Matt Slocum, File)

FILE - President Joe Biden, center, and first lady Jill Biden, right, pay for a purchase as they greet supporters at a Waffle House in Marietta, Ga., June 28, 2024, following a presidential debate in Atlanta. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci, File)

FILE - President Joe Biden, right, and Republican presidential candidate former President Donald Trump, left, participate in a presidential debate hosted by CNN, Thursday, June 27, 2024, in Atlanta. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert)

FILE - First lady Jill Biden speaks during an event at the White House in Washington, Jan. 16, 2025. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon, File)

NAIROBI, Kenya (AP) — Police in Kenya have arrested eight female students on suspicion of arson, authorities said Friday, after a fire destroyed a dormitory at a boarding school, killing 16 children and injuring dozens of others. The motive is still unknown.

Police held 30 students overnight for questioning. Authorities said school administrators would face disciplinary action for safety violations after an exit door was found to be locked during the panicked rush to escape the building. At least 79 people were injured.

Education Minister Julius Ogamba said two teachers were aware that students were planning something but failed to take appropriate action, without elaborating.

A full day after the blaze, some parents said they had still not been told whether their children were under arrest or just being questioned.

“We have not even been told about the eight that police have arrested,” a parent, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of fear that her daughter could be victimized, told The Associated Press. “We are just here and no one is giving us any information.”

At a hospital morgue some 28 kilometers (18 miles) from the school, other parents awaited DNA tests to identify their children. A distraught father, John Muiruri, said they were being given conflicting information about the location of the bodies.

“They have just been doing some sideshows, trying to prevent us from knowing the truth, but the reality we have come to know is that we have lost our children," he said. “What we want to know is where are the remains of our daughters.”

The Utumishi Girls School, located about 120 kilometers (75 miles) from the capital, Nairobi, is managed and sponsored by the police, and many of the students are daughters of police officers.

“Investigators have conducted extensive interviews with students, teaching staff and other witnesses, while forensic teams carry out a detailed review of available CCTV footage,” John Marete, a spokesman for the investigative arm of the national police, said in a statement.

Education Minister Ogamba said the school's board of management had been dissolved and the principal would face disciplinary action for failing to comply with safety regulations.

“In particular, there was congestion in the dormitory and one exit door was locked, contrary to the prescribed safety requirements,” he said.

Fires at schools have long been a cause of concern for education officials in East Africa, where classrooms and dormitories are often crowded and firefighting equipment is rarely within reach.

Fires are sometimes attributed to electrical faults but there have also been cases of students burning down schools because of disciplinary issues.

Associated Press journalist Zelipha Kirobi in Gilgil, Kenya, contributed.

John Muiruri, father of Nicole Muiruri, who died in the fire at Utumishi Girls Academy, shows a photo of his daughter as he waits for body identification and DNA testing at Naivasha Funeral Home in Naivasha Town, Rift Valley region, Kenya, Friday, May 29, 2026. (AP Photo/Andrew Kasuku)

A parent of a victim of the fire at the Utumishi Girls Academy is consoled ahead of body identification and DNA testing at Naivasha Funeral Home in Naivasha Town, Rift Valley region, Kenya, Friday, May 29, 2026. (AP Photo/Andrew Kasuku)

A parent of a victim of the fire at the Utumishi Girls Academy is consoled ahead of body identification and DNA testing at Naivasha Funeral Home in Naivasha Town, Rift Valley region, Kenya, Friday, May 29, 2026. (AP Photo/Andrew Kasuku)

An injured student is evacuated following an early morning fire outbreak at Utumishi Girls School in the Gilgil area, central Kenya, Thursday, May 28, 2026. (AP Photo/Andrew Kasuku)

Red Cross members recover the bodies of students who died in the fire at the Utumishi Girls School in the Gilgil area, central Kenya, Thursday, May 28, 2026. (AP Photo/Andrew Kasuku)