Jill Biden changes tune on debate that altered a Raleigh appearance and the race
AI-generated summary reviewed by our newsroom.
- CBS released a clip of Jill Biden reflecting on the June 2024 debate.
- The N&O changed the story it had drafted about a Raleigh rally after the debate.
- President Biden ended his reelection campaign and passed the reins to Kamala Harris.
Good morning! It’s Danielle Battaglia with another edition of Under the Dome focused on the Trump administration.
But let’s talk about former President Joe Biden.
On Wednesday afternoon, CBS News released a short clip of an interview of former First Lady Jill Biden reflecting on the debate between her husband and President Donald Trump in June 2024.
The full interview aired Sunday.
But the clip was surprising enough that most major networks turned to cover it Wednesday.
“I don’t know what happened,” she said. “As I watched it, I thought, ‘Oh, my God, he’s having a stroke.’ And it scared me to death.”
She added that she had never seen her husband that way before or after.
The reporters around me in The News & Observer’s newsroom turned and looked at me as our newsroom televisions lit up with this new statement.
Let me give you a peek behind the curtain from our reporting the night of the debate and the day after.
Knowing Biden would travel straight from Atlanta, where the debate was held, to Raleigh, to hold a rally the next day, we wanted to be prepared with a story that next morning to prep readers for Biden’s local appearance.
The gist of it: Biden would be the first president since 2010 to stay overnight in North Carolina. We would update the story in the morning with highlights from the debate before his rally began.
But you never read that article.
As editor Jessica Banov and I watched the debate with millions of other people, we saw Biden on stage looking dazed, confused, his voice hoarse and his answers trailing off, sometimes incoherent.
We scrapped our original story and worked long past midnight, knowing that Biden’s next-day appearance in Raleigh would become a high-pressure test on whether his campaign would survive.
But as we were writing that story, the first lady was on stage in Atlanta, praising her husband’s performance.
“Joe, you did such a great job,” she said. “You answered every question. You knew all the answers.”
In Raleigh, she said, “What you saw last night on the debate stage was Joe Biden, a president with integrity and character, who told the truth. And Donald Trump told lie, after lie, after lie.”
Biden told the crowd he wasn’t as young as he used to be, but promised he could do the job.
And Jill Biden went on to tell people that she told her husband not to be defined by those 90 minutes.
In the month that followed, reports centered on Jill Biden being the one calling the shots on whether her husband’s campaign continued.
As we all now know, it would take more than a month before the president ended his reelection campaign and passed the reins over to Vice President Kamala Harris, leaving her 107 days to campaign against Trump.
Trump came out victorious.
And if you’re like the reporters around me asking why she is coming out with these statements now: she wrote a book.
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That’s it for now. Thanks for reading and supporting local journalism.
Be kind to each other. If you have any feedback or tips for this edition of the newsletter, feel free to reach out to me directly at dbattaglia@mcclatchydc.com.
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