Jill Biden frantically wondered whether her husband, then-President Joe Biden, had been drugged ahead of his catastrophic 2024 debate performance against Donald Trump, the former first lady’s forthcoming memoir reveals.

In “View from the East Wing,” out June 2, Jill Biden writes of her husband on the night of June 27, 2024, “I felt like we were watching an AI hologram of the man we knew, and the hologram was glitching,” according to an excerpt published Thursday by The Atlantic.

“Is he short-circuiting?” the author recalls thinking to herself. “Is this a stroke? … Has he been drugged? … Oh God—will people watching assume this is how he is all the time?”

The excerpt emerged after the former first lady told CBS News in an interview airing Sunday that “I had never, ever seen Joe like that before or since. Never.”

“I don’t know what happened,” Jill Biden continued. “As I watched it, I thought, ‘Oh, my God, he’s having a stroke.’ And it scared me to death.”

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Per The Atlantic, the then-first lady writes that she should have asked for her husband to be blood-tested after the CNN forum, and suggested he take a cognitive test only to be overruled by White House staff.

That, however, contradicts testimony from Joe Biden’s chief of staff Jeffrey Zients, who told Congress he wanted the president to take a cognitive test after the debate. According to Zients, then-senior White House communications adviser Anita Dunn and national security adviser Jake Sullivan supported his efforts. 

But longtime Biden physician Dr. Kevin O’Connor never administered such a test, and took the Fifth Amendment when testifying before Congress.

Anthony Bernal and Annie Tomasini — known as the most powerful aides in the Biden administration, with full control over access to the president and his schedule — also took the Fifth.

“To this day, I still don’t know what happened [at the debate] … It was inexplicable to me,” Jill Biden writes.

However, she indicates, her husband had an idea of how poorly he performed against his Republican rival.

When he walked off the stage in Atlanta, she claims, he whispered to her: “I really f**ked up, didn’t I?”

“‘Yes, you did,’ I whispered back.”

Biden’s performance — in which he struggled to answer questions, froze on camera and appeared dazed and confused — led several Democrats to publicly question his ability to serve a second term.

The White House pushed back forcefully, claiming the 46th president had a bad night and was suffering from a cold. Jill Biden led the defense, arguing her husband was more than capable of running the country for four more years. 

During the CBS interview, Jill Biden insisted that her husband did not decline cognitively during his term in office, but was “slowing down.”

“He was the same, the essence of the same Joe Biden, but yeah, he was slowing down,” she said. “He was getting older. It’s a very intense job. I think it ages you — quickly.”

The recounting of Joe Biden’s downfall has outraged Democrats like former Barack Obama spokesman Tommy Vietor, who wrote on X: “Apparently the goal of this book is to dispel accusations of a coverup, but mostly its just enraging to read that this was JILL BIDEN’S(!!) reaction to the debate performance after the Biden family, campaign, and his supporters savaged people for articulating the same feelings.”

Former first son Hunter Biden has also suggested that his father’s dreadful debate night was due to the side effects of the sleep aid Ambien.

“I know exactly what happened in that debate,” Hunter told YouTube personality Andrew Callaghan in an interview released in July 2025, on the anniversary of Joe Biden ending his re-election bid. 

“He flew around the world. He’s 81 years old. He’s tired. They give him Ambien to be able to sleep and he gets up on the stage and looks like a deer in the headlights.”