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Jill Biden has opened up about her ongoing tension with Nancy Pelosi, following the ex-House Speaker’s role in encouraging a Democratic push to sideline President Joe Biden from the 2024 presidential race.
During a challenging June 2024 debate against Donald Trump, where Joe Biden faced difficulties in articulating his points clearly, key Democratic figures, including Pelosi, publicly called for Biden to step down from the race.
Jill Biden, 74, described the incident as both a public and private betrayal, revealing that Pelosi, 86, had also privately advocated for Biden’s withdrawal from the race in July 2024.
Speaking in an interview with the Wall Street Journal about her upcoming memoir, Jill mentioned that while President Biden and Pelosi have recently reconciled, she herself has not yet been able to move past the incident.
The former President and Nancy Pelosi encountered each other at the funeral of Kennedy descendant Tatiana Schlossberg in January, marking their first meeting following the dispute.
Jill credited her husband for magnanimously leaving his pew to shake her hand during the ‘sign of peace’ ritual of the Mass.
But Jill pointedly revealed that faced with the same opportunity to make amends just feet away, she hadn’t sought out Pelosi.Â
‘I haven’t actually seen her to make up with her or not make up with her. I didn’t even see her in the church,’ Jill said.
Jill herself has not forgiven Pelosi or gone out of her way to make up with the former House Speaker
Jill (promoting her book this morning on MS NOW) has since published her memoir, View from the East Wing, in which she reflects on Biden’s presidency and its impact on their family
Joe Biden presents the Presidential Medal of Freedom to U.S. Representative and former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) during a ceremony at the White House in Washington, U.S., May 3, 2024
The former first lady insists she’s ready to let it go given Joe’s recent cancer diagnosis: ‘That’s what I’ve learned through this cancer diagnosis … Life’s so short. Why live with the anger and the pain of it all? I mean, move on. Let’s move on.’Â
Biden and Pelosi worked closely for decades, dating back to his Senate years in the 1980s while she was rising in House Democratic leadership.
The two built a tight political alliance during the Obama era, coordinating on major legislation when Biden was vice president and Pelosi was speaker, with their families also maintaining close ties as part of Washington’s Democratic elite.Â
But in a major turning point after Biden’s disastrous June 2024 debate against Donald Trump, Pelosi declined to state that she endorsed him.
‘It’s up to the President to decide if he is going to run. We’re all encouraging him to make that decision because time is running short,’ Pelosi said on MSNBC’s Morning Joe.
Biden, 83, was diagnosed in May 2025, four months after leaving office, with an aggressive form of prostate cancer that had spread to his bones.
Jill has since published her memoir, View from the East Wing, in which she reflects on Biden’s presidency and its impact on their family.Â
The book is generating significant controversy among former Biden aides after Jill said she feared Biden was having a ‘stroke’ or had been ‘drugged’ during the Trump debate, where he struggled to speak and string together coherent arguments.
Caroline Kennedy-Schlossberg is seen at the funeral of her daughter Tatiana Schlossberg on January 5, 2026 in New York City
Joe Biden and John Kerry (right) at the funeral of Tatiana Schlossberg on January 5, 2026 in New York City
‘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?’ Jill writes in View From the East Wing.
She remembers thinking: ‘Oh God – will people watching assume this is how he is all the time?’
Biden appeared frail and repeatedly lost his train of thought as he slurred his way through the infamous June 2024 clash with Trump, a watershed moment that triggered Democratic allies to openly question his fitness for office.
It wasn’t just his supporters who saw disaster: Joe himself admitted he’d suffered a primetime car crash in front of the voting public, Jill reveals.
As Biden walked off stage, he confessed to her: ‘I really f***ed up, didn’t I?’
”Yes, you did,’ I whispered back,’ Jill writes.