Former first lady Jill Biden is to blame for her husband, former President Joe Biden, moving forward with his campaign for reelection despite his growing incapabilities, and it was "elder abuse" to keep him in the race, Washington Post columnist and insider Sally Quinn says in a new interview.
Still, it was also Biden's own "egotistical decision" to try to stay in the White House, Quinn, the widow of Watergate-era Washington Post Executive Editor Ben Bradlee, said in an extensive interview with Tara Palmeri for her Substack news page, The Red Letter.
"I blame Jill Biden for this," Quinn said. "Jill Biden is his wife. And if Jill Biden had stood up and had gone to him and said, 'Joe, you can't do it. And if you do, you're on your own. I'm out,' he wouldn't have run because he couldn't have done it without her support. And I just think it was a terrible disservice to the country."
Quinn, drawing parallels between the former president and Bradlee, who died after an eight-year battle with dementia, said she feels sorry for Biden because she does not think his wife was protecting him "from himself," including in his ill-fated debate against then-GOP candidate Donald Trump.
"After that hideous debate, right after the debate, they're in the spin room, and she got his hand up, and they're [chanting], 'Victory, victory; we won, we won; it was great, great,' and the next day, he's off in North Carolina making a victory speech," said Quinn. "I thought, what were they watching? I thought it was just elder abuse really what they were putting him through."
Her comments come after Department of Justice official Leo Terrell stated that the former first lady should face elder abuse charges.
"Everybody knew that there were problems with speech and dementia, and people were distraught that he was running again," Quinn said. "I don't know any reporter who didn't write something they knew about the president's condition."
Quinn said that when her husband was diagnosed with dementia, she finally got to the point where she would not allow him to make further public appearances to protect his dignity.
And with Biden, "everybody was horrified that he was put in a position where he was allowed to run by his staff and by his wife," said Quinn.
"People felt sorry for him, but it was still his egotistical decision to stay in office, and look what happened," she said.
Meanwhile, Quinn said she does believe that special counsel Robert Hur is a "decent man," but it was clear that he was accurate about his description of Biden's problems when recommending not to prosecute him.
"Nobody was shocked by his conclusions," she said.
Quinn also commented that there were "family interventions" about whether Biden should run again, but "Jill was always very pro, and that's what it was going to be."
"Everybody felt sorry for him and felt that he was not coerced because he clearly wanted to run but that he was being set up for failure," said Quinn. "I think it was unpatriotic of him to run and unpatriotic of his staff to insist that he run, to support it."
Quinn said that she was shocked when she learned the news that Biden is suffering from aggressive prostate cancer, as she doesn't "see how it got this far."
"The president of the United States has the best medical care of anybody in the world," she said. "It should have been diagnosed a long time ago, and so, it's hard for me not to believe that they didn't know about it. That's my little conspiracy theory, but I just don't understand how it got this far."
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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