Dr. Jill Biden told the hosts of MS NOW’s “Morning Joe” on Tuesday that it has been “heartbreaking” for her to watch the Trump administration tear down so much of her husband’s presidential legacy over the past two years.
“It’s heartbreaking because I think Joe’s whole mission was to make lives better for the American people, and that was his focus and that’s what he did,” the former first lady told Willie Geist. “So to see so many food programs cut or health programs cut or the research money for women’s health — something that I’m really interested in — it’s heartbreaking.”
Biden appeared on “Morning Joe” this week to promote her new memoir, “View from the East Wing,” which documents some of her experiences in the White House during her husband Joe’s four-year presidency. When asked about her memories of the White House’s East Wing, which the Trump administration has since torn down to make way for the president’s planned ballroom, she first joked, “Yeah, remember that?”
“I just think we’ve lost so much institutional memory. I love the East Wing. I loved my offices in the East Wing,” Biden added. “When you come to visit the White House, that’s where you would enter: the East Wing. [You could see] the excitement that people would feel as they came in to take the picture with their families.”
During her “Morning Joe” guest appearance, Biden also addressed her husband’s stage four cancer diagnosis, which was disclosed to the public in May 2025.
“Cancer is really tough. I would say he’s doing OK. He’s still making speeches. He’s still on Amtrak a couple of times a month keeping a schedule. But cancer takes its toll,” she shared. “I know every family in America has been touched by cancer, so I think that people can relate when I say he gets tired a little more often. But, I don’t know, it’s been tough.”
“Morning Joe” co-host Jonathan Lemire then noted that former President Biden’s early 2025 cancer diagnosis raised some questions about whether or not he would have even been able to hold presidential office if he had continued to seek reelection and won in 2024. When asked about that, former First Lady Biden admitted: “I don’t know. I don’t know the answer to that.”
She additionally reflected on her husband’s infamously poor debate performance against President Trump in the summer of 2024, which almost single-handedly ended his reelection campaign and paved the way for then-Vice President Kamala Harris to take his place as the Democratic Party’s ultimately unsuccessful presidential nominee that year. In the immediate aftermath of the debate in question, Biden said she was “scared to death” for her husband’s health.
“As we walked off the stage, he whispered to me, ‘Jill, you know, I really’ — I’ll put it nicely — ‘screwed up, didn’t I?’ And I said, ‘Yeah, Joe, you did.’ So he knew,” Biden recalled. “He was checked out by the doctors. They said, ‘He’s fine.’ We went on to do three more events that night, and Joe was like he always was. So to me, as I look back, that was so inexplicable. To this day, it’s just inexplicable.”
