Former first lady Jill Biden defended her husband, former President Joe Biden, as a presidential candidate on Tuesday, saying she believes he would have defeated President Donald Trump if he were the final nominee in 2024.
“I believe he would have beat Donald Trump in that election,” Jill Biden said in a Tuesday morning interview on MSNow‘s Morning Joe.
Jill Biden has been rehashing the 2024 presidential election in several media appearances as she promotes her new book, View From The East Wing. In the Tuesday interview, she stood by her husband and her belief in his ability to win, but also discussed how difficult the 2024 election was for their family and addressed the current state of the former president’s health as he battles stage four metastatic prostate cancer.
When asked if her husband would have been able to serve a second term with his current health, Jill Biden answered, “I don’t know the answer to that.” She discussed how “painful” the whole situation of being in the race and then dropping out was for their family.
“I would never want anyone I loved to go through that again,” she said. “It was so painful, not just for us, not just for me, and for Joe, but we have children and grandchildren, and to see them have to go through that was really a hard thing, a hard time for our family, and I would never want to put our family through that again.”
The former first lady also touched on some of the backlash from the Democratic Party that she and Joe Biden received for staying in the race until July 21, 2024. She said it was “hard to go through” hearing major voices in the Democratic Party, such as former President Barack Obama and Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi, signal that Joe Biden should forgo his reelection bid.
“We have had the support of the Democratic Party for so long,” she said. “Joe’s been in public service as long as I’ve known him, and it was, it was hard to go through that.”
She also touched on former Vice President Kamala Harris’s shading of the former president’s headstrong decision to continue to run in her memoir, 107 Days. Harris had called the decision to continue “reckless” and wrote that the 2024 Democratic nominee “wasn’t a choice that should have been left to an individual’s ego, an individual’s ambition,” referring to the former president.
“I was a little surprised that she wrote that,” Jill Biden said. “I thought we were a great – Joe and Kamala, me, Doug, – I thought we were a great team.”
JILL BIDEN SAYS JOE WAS ‘SLOWING DOWN’ BEFORE ABANDONING 2024 BID
The former president was diagnosed with stage four prostate cancer in May 2025, with the cancer soon after metastasizing to his bones, and Jill Biden gave an update on her husband’s health, saying, “It has been tough.”
“Cancer is really tough, and so I would say he’s doing OK,” she said. “He’s still making speeches, he’s still on Amtrak a couple times a month, keeping his schedule, but cancer takes its toll. I know every family in America has been touched by cancer, so I think that people can relate to when I say, you know, he gets tired a little more often.”
