How Jill Biden And Her Staff 'Protect' Joe from the Press Amid Growing Concern About 'Poor Memory'
Joe Biden has held fewer media events than any other modern U.S. president, and journalists who cover the White House beat know why.
First lady Jill Biden knows her 81-year-old husband has a history of embarrassing himself in front of reporters, and she tries to keep it from happening, the New York Post reported Friday.
According to the Post, media members know they have to try to “bait” the president with shouted questions when he’s walking alone across the South Lawn of the White House to board Marine One, or having just de-boarded it, because that’s the best time to get a response from him.
If the first lady is with him, she’ll “hold her husband’s hand the entire way across the lawn,” according to the outlet.
Jill Biden’s role in protecting the president against his apparent worst enemy — himself — has “come under new scrutiny,” according to the Post, following the release Thursday of special counsel Robert Hur’s report on his investigation into the president’s mishandling of classified material found at his Delaware residence and elsewhere.
In it, Hur said he declined to recommend charges against Joe Biden because a jury would most likely be sympathetic to him, a “elderly man with a poor memory.”
A forthcoming book by Katie Rogers, White House correspondent for The New York Times, detailed Jill Biden’s response after her husband was permitted to speak to the media for nearly two hours and made, in the Post’s words, “several factual errors and noteworthy gaffes.”
“Why didn’t anyone stop that?” Jill Biden demanded of aides and the president himself. No one had an answer for her, according to Rogers.
Readers of The Western Journal are already familiar with the litany of gaffes and misstatements Americans have seen from this president. For example:
In January, Joe Biden claimed to have taken a picture with Rep. Deborah Ross at an event in Raleigh, North Carolina, before realizing that that was impossible, since Ross was in Washington, D.C., at the time.
Roughly a week later, he broke President Barack Obama’s “Politics 101” rule by posing for a photograph wearing a construction hat — backwards.
Another week went by, and the president claimed to have spoken in 2021 to French President Francois Mitterrand, who died in 1996.
Only a few days later, Joe Biden, speaking at a fundraiser of the same 2021 summit, said he’d spoken there to German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, who died in 2017.
Then, this week, in a news conference defending himself against the description of his poor mental acuity raised in Hur’s report, the president called Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sissi the “president of Mexico.”
That news conference was such a disaster that even the left-leaning Axios called it a “debacle” and CNN was forced to fact check three claims made during it by the president and rate them all “false.”
Those examples are from 2024 alone, and they’re not the only ones that have been covered by the media. As a reminder, we’re only 41 days into the year.
One can only imagine how much longer that list might be if Jill Biden weren’t “protecting” her husband.
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