u. s. history

WASHINGTON — Jill Biden is breaking her silence about Joe Biden’s decision to abruptly end his 2024 presidential reelection bid under pressure from Democrats concerned about his age, health and viability against Republican Donald Trump in a rematch of their 2020 campaign.

A political spouse for nearly 50 years, Jill Biden said she has never publicly discussed her feelings about the three-week stretch when her husband ended his political career, instead saving her thoughts for the pages of her soon-to-be-released memoir.

Gallery Books, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, on Wednesday announced that her book, “View from the East Wing: A Memoir,” is scheduled to be published June 2.

Jill Biden told the Associated Press in a brief telephone interview that the book is a “reflection of my four years as first lady” and that writing it was somewhat healing.

“It was kind of cathartic for me to write it, and I wrote about all the, you know, sometimes painful — but other times, most of it really beautiful moments that Joe and I shared during his presidency,” she said.

Jill Biden declined on Tuesday to discuss any of those moments, good or bad — including watching her husband work his way to the decision to end his five-decade-long political career by dropping out of the 2024 presidential race.

In an announcement video shared on Instagram, she said she wants to “set the record straight.”

The last chapter of her husband’s political career

In April 2023, then-President Joe Biden was 80 and the oldest president in U.S. history when he announced he was running for a second term. His age and fitness to serve another four years — which would take him to age 86 — became a source of concern for the public. Some fellow Democrats began to pressure him to step aside after he turned in a disastrous debate performance against Trump in June 2024 in which he struggled, in a raspy voice, to land his debating points and often appeared to lose his train of thought. Aides blamed the poor performance on a cold.

Joe Biden at first insisted that he would stay in the race, but after a few weeks he withdrew from the campaign and endorsed Democrat Kamala Harris, his vice president. Harris became the party’s presidential nominee but lost to Trump in the November 2024 election.

Jill Biden said that, with the book, “I have put things in perspective,” presenting what she describes as a “more balanced view” of her husband’s time as president.

The memoir is also a tribute of the sorts to women who, like herself, juggle multiple roles.

“It’s also a story about my being able to balance life, you know, as a working woman and as a mother, a grandmother, a first lady,” she said.

During her four years in the role, Jill Biden, 74, made history as the first first lady to continue the career she had before entering the White House. She had taught English and writing for decades at the community college level, and she continued teaching twice a week at a Northern Virginia school while serving as first lady.

Joe Biden ‘doing well’ after his cancer diagnosis

The former president’s office announced in May 2025 that he was diagnosed with an aggressive form of prostate cancer and that it had spread to his bones. He’s receiving treatment.

Jill Biden said it was “quite a shock getting the diagnosis” for her husband, who’s now 83.

“The fact that it is in his bones means that he will have cancer, you know, all his lifetime,” Jill Biden said. She said the doctors say he will “live out his natural life.”

“Like most retired couples, he’ll probably drive me crazy till the end of it,” she joked.

She said he visits Washington at least once a week for meetings or to give speeches.

A unique period in American history

The former first lady also writes in the book about serving during a unique period in U.S. history, including the COVID-19 pandemic and the aftermath of the insurrection at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, according to the publisher.

Her husband was sworn into office on the steps of the Capitol on Jan. 20, 2021, just two weeks after a mob of Trump supporters, spurred by his false claims that the Republican lost because of election fraud, stormed the building in a violent attempt to keep lawmakers from certifying Joe Biden’s victory.

Joe Biden’s first year in office was dominated by the federal response to the pandemic and, while he mostly stayed at the White House, Jill Biden wore face mask and traveled around the country to encourage people to get their vaccinations. She also continued her advocacy on behalf of military families, education and community colleges, cancer prevention and women’s health initiatives.

Before she became first lady, Jill Biden was second lady of the United States from 2009 to 2017, when her husband was Barack Obama’s vice president. She currently chairs the Milken Institute’s Women’s Health Network.

Jill Biden is also the author of “Where the Light Enters,” published in 2019, in which she writes about meeting Joe Biden, then a U.S. senator from Delaware, and marrying and building a life with him. She also has written three children’s books.

Superville writes for the Associated Press.

The pet did a neat trick: Before a room filled with heads of state from across Latin America, Little Marco spoke Spanish.

His owner — well, his soul’s owner at least— grinned and joked, “I think he’s better in Spanish” than in English. Following President Trump, it was Pentagon Pete’s turn to tease Little Marco.

“I only speak American,” Secretary of Defense Hegseth cracked. The auditorium stayed quiet save for Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who meekly protested, “I only speak Cuban.”

Trump gave him a pat on the back. Good boy, Marco.

The exchange, which happened over a weekend dominated by the war with Iran, was brief yet said so much about the times Latinos live in. Rubio, the most powerful Latino politician in U.S. history, might as well have been to Trump and Hegseth the Chihuahua that says “Yo quiero Taco Bell.” The man who has played an oversized role in pushing a president who campaigned against costly foreign wars and chaotic regime changes to do both was brought back down to an undignified size.

Little Marco indeed.

Here’s a reminder that no matter how high and mighty you get in Trump’s White House, a Latino is still an exotic “other.”

Tokenizing someone is always an ugly thing — yet Rubio deserves no tears. He has made a career out of wearing his latinidad like a shiny guayabera when convenient, long casting himself as the boy-faced exception to the corrupt, ineffectual Latino politician archetype. That stance has fueled a 27-year career — Florida speaker of the House, U.S. senator, former presidential candidate, secretary of State and national security advisor. That has made many conservatives and more than a few Latinos feel he’s not just capable of a strong White House run but that he could even win were he to do so.

All it cost Rubio was his morals and backbone. All he had to do was roll over.

We Latinos deserve better — and yet we kind of don’t.

The story liberals and conservatives have always told about America’s largest minority is that we would irrevocably change the United States — the former group maintained it would be for the better, the latter insisted we would cause this country’s downfall. Rubio proves that at our worst, Latinos show that in our rush to assimilate and be embraced, we often become the worst kind of Americans.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio speaks as President Trump during a NATO summit in June in the Hague.

(Brendan Smialowski / Pool Photo)

We’re the ones whom the American psyche sees as perpetual invaders, yet we sign up by the thousands for the Border Patrol, Immigration and Customs Enforcement and other agencies in Trump’s deportation Leviathan. Even as Trump slimed Latinos during his first term and his years out of office, an increasing number of us warmed up to him — surely, he was referring to other Latinos — until Trump captured more of our votes in 2024 than any Republican presidential candidate ever.

It takes a certain type of person to go from child of Cuban immigrants — the favorite son of an exile community that transformed Miami from a retiree haven into one of the capitals of Latin America — to tell European leaders last month that they and the United States “opened our doors to an unprecedented wave of mass migration that threatens the cohesion of our societies, the continuity of our culture, and the future of our people.”

It takes the worst kind of Latino.

I called Rubio a vendido in a previous columna after he cheered on the extrajudicial capture of Venezuelan despot Nicolás Maduro. He’s definitely still a sellout — what else to call someone who once fiercely opposed Trump but now sidles up to him like a cockapoo? But the most pathetic part about Rubio’s rise is that his followers see him as the culmination of the long-held dreams of Latinos that things would become better for our ancestral Latin American countries and ourselves once one of us was charge.

Alas, no. He’s living up to a realpolitik maxim attributed to various Latin American caudillos: For my friends, everything; for my enemies, the law.

Strongmen like El Salvador and Argentina presidents Nayib Bukele and Javier Milei get coddled and receive foreign aid; college students on study visas who criticize the Trump administration get nabbed by la migra. Rubio is overseeing a foreign policy that currently has the U.S. dictating how Venezuela will be governed, is bombing Iran like the country was a game of Pachinko and is slowly choking Cuba into collapse. He’s the unholy child of Bush-era neoconservativism and MAGA — and Rubio is just getting started.

That’s how he set himself up to be used as Latino punch line by Trump and Hegseth. The setting: the inaugural meeting at a Trump golf course near Miami of the Shield of the Americas, a coalition of Western Hemisphere countries ostensibly assembled to fight drug cartels. It resembled one of those lesser super-groups in the Marvel Cinematic Universe — you got Costa Rica instead of Mexico, Bolivia instead of Brazil. The group even has a crappy logo. You know how unserious the confab was when Trump’s point person for this is Kristi Noem, whom he literally had just fired as Homeland Security secretary.

After Trump rambled through a short speech, it was Rubio’s time to offer remarks. Here was a chance for the secretary of State, the man the Atlantic recently called “bright and well spoken,” to channel his inner Simón Bolivar or José Martí. The secretary of State thanked everyone present in English, but not before praising Trump for his “bold leadership” and bragging that the president is “one of the most historic figures in American history.”

Then Rubio looked back at his beaming master.

President Trump signs a proclamation committing to countering cartel criminal activity at the Shield of the Americas Summit on Saturday at Trump National Doral Miami in Doral, Fla.

(Rebecca Blackwell / Associated Press)

“You all right if I — “ he began before Trump cut him off with a magnanimous, “Sure. Please.”

That’s when Little Marco spoke in flawless Spanish. Rubio’s comments weren’t much different from what he said in English, save his remark that what they all planned to do by following Trump “will make future generations grateful for the work we are doing today.”

That last statement sums up Rubio. For centuries, Latin America has yearned for prosperity and peace free from American interference. This hope has fueled revolutions, music, film, culture and all the best things the region has produced only to have U.S.-backed tyrants crush those movements.

That’s the torch Rubio now proudly carries.

“All my life I’ve been in a hurry to get to my future,” he wrote in his 2013 memoir, “American Son.” Rubio’s future is now. And our present — not just Latinos, but all Americans — is worse because of it.

Dios mío.