As the media and Democrats continue to desert Joe Biden in the wake of his disastrous debate performance late last month, many are also beginning to question the role Jill Biden has played in covering up her husband’s decline.
On Monday’s show, Megyn was joined by Stu Burguiere, host of Stu Does America, and columnist Dave Marcus to discuss how the first lady appears to be the one pushing President Biden to continue as nominee and why she is emerging as a “villain.”
Jill’s ‘All In’
Despite the pressure to step aside, Biden has maintained that he intends to stay in the 2024 presidential race as the Democratic nominee – a message his wife reiterated on the campaign trail on Monday.
“For all the talk out there about this race, Joe has made it clear that he’s all in,” she said at an event in Wilmington, North Carolina. “That’s the decision that he’s made, and just as he has always supported my career, I am all in too.”
The Tar Heel State was one of three battleground states Jill was visiting in an effort to drum up enthusiasm for the Biden-Harris ticket. In Megyn’s view, the first lady is “gross” and emerging as “the villain in all of this.”
The Cover Up
To that point, new reporting from Olivia Nuzzi in The New Yorker suggests the first lady has been shielding her husband from the press. She recalled her run-in with Jill at the White House Correspondents dinner in April, after which members of the press in attendance apparently made guesses about “how dead” the president appeared to be.
Nuzzi said the first lady looked at her “with a confused, panicked expression” in the basement of the White House. As she explained, she had not been in the same room as Biden in quite some time because skipped the season’s holiday parties. She wrote that she soon realized what Jill was worried about:
I followed the first lady’s gaze and found the president. Now I understood her panicked expression. Up close, the president does not look quite plausible. It’s not that he’s old. We all know what old looks like. Bernie Sanders is old. Mitch McConnell is old. Most of the ruling class is old. The president was something stranger, something not of this earth.
My heart stopped as I extended my hand to greet the president. I tried to make eye contact, but it was like his eyes, though open, were not on. His face had a waxy quality. He smiled. It was a sweet smile. It made me sad in a way I can’t fully convey…
He took my hand in his and I was startled by how it felt, not cold but cool. The basement was so warm that people were complaining they were sweating… I said hello. His sweet smile stayed frozen. He spoke very slowly and in a very soft voice. “And what’s your name?” he asked.
Burguiere said anyone who has watched a loved one lose their faculties knows how heartbreaking it is. “I remember where I was standing in my house when I was on the phone with my grandma and, for the first time, she didn’t know who I was. It’s one of the worst moments of my life,” he shared. “And [my] family’s response to that was not to say, ‘Hey, what else can we get out of her before she’s gone?’… It was, ‘How do we make her last days the best that they could be?’”
He does not believe the president is being cared for the same way. “It is the exact opposite calculation with [Biden’s] people,” Burguiere added. “And it is revolting.”
Jill the ‘Handler’
The first lady was with the president on the campaign trail over the weekend when he descended into a rambling story that Megyn said she couldn’t even try taking a shot at explaining. Regardless, Jill was standing behind her husband with a group of people when the speech started going off the rails.
At that point, video shows her motion to those around and begin walking towards Biden, seemingly in an effort to cut him off. “We’ve seen that repeatedly now,” Megyn said. “She is his handler. She is the one who is going to take the helm of stopping us from seeing his decline.”
During an appearance on MSNBC, Michael Moore accused those continuing to push Biden to run again of committing “elder abuse,” and Megyn said the treatment of the president is indefensible. “All of us know if our spouse were in this condition, we’d hug them right into retirement. We’d be sitting on the couch next to them watching Matlock,” she noted. “How dare she pretend this is a normal campaign and [the debate] was just a bad night. That is her messaging he is repeating, not the other way around.”
You can check out Megyn’s full interview with Burguiere and Marcus by tuning in to episode 831 on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you like to listen. And don’t forget that you can catch The Megyn Kelly Show live on SiriusXM’s Triumph (channel 111) weekdays from 12pm to 2pm ET.