'Has He Been Drugged?'

As she watched President Biden stumble through the most cringeworthy portion of his disastrous June 2024 debate, First Lady Jill Biden wondered if her husband had unknowingly ingested drugs or was having a medical episode on live television. "Is he short-circuiting?" Jill Biden thought. "Is this a stroke? I felt like we were watching an AI hologram of the man we knew, and the hologram was glitching. Has he been drugged?"

Her mind then wandered to a more personal anxiety, considering how his nonsensical word salads—one of which ended with "we finally beat Medicare"—might implicate her as the person best positioned to know if the man who appeared to disassemble onstage was privately prone to incoherence. "Oh God—will people watching assume this is how he is all the time?" she writes in her new memoir, View From the East Wing, a copy of which The Atlantic obtained ahead of its June 2 release date.