President Donald Trump on Wednesday questioned Jill Biden’s account of what happened after the 2024 debate, seizing on her claim that she feared Joe Biden was having a stroke and asking why the couple then went to a Waffle House.
Trump said people had seen Biden before the debate and he was fine, adding that he was not “Winston Churchill,” but was “all right.” He also asked why Jill Biden would bring him to a Waffle House if she thought he had suffered a stroke, turning a fresh passage from her memoir into another public fight over Biden’s health.
The dispute erupted as Jill Biden has been promoting “View from the East Wing: A Memoir,” which was released Tuesday. In the book, she wrote that Joe Biden’s debate answer about beating Medicare sounded nonsensical and made her think, “Is this a stroke?” She also wrote that his performance felt like watching “an AI hologram” glitching in front of the audience.
That account has now become part of a wider argument over how Biden appeared that night and what happened once the debate ended. In a Tuesday appearance on MS NOW’s “Morning Joe,” Jill Biden said doctors checked her husband after the performance and before the couple moved on to other events. “They said he’s fine,” she said, adding that the Bidens “went on to do three more events that night” and that “Joe was like he always was.”
Trump used the Waffle House stop to cast doubt on her version of events. Asked whether Melania Trump would have let him go to a Waffle House if she thought he had suffered a stroke, he said “even in good times, she wouldn’t,” then added, “Although I would actually, it’s not so bad.”
The friction is that Jill Biden has described a frightening moment onstage, but she has also said doctors checked Joe Biden and cleared him, after which he kept working the rest of the night. The public record still does not answer the basic medical question she raised in the memoir: what, exactly, happened to Biden during that debate and in the hours that followed.
Jill Biden has also said on “The View” that her husband would not have been in a good place to serve a second term had he stayed in the race and won, citing his cancer diagnosis. With the book now out and the interviews continuing, Trump’s comments have pushed her account back into the center of the post-debate reckoning, where the next round of reaction is likely to focus less on the memoir and more on the unresolved gap at its core.
