Jill Biden's New Story Reopens Democrats' Biggest Problem: Trust

Jill Biden former spokesperson Michael LaRosa argues that the debate didn't create concerns about Joe Biden—it confirmed them. And now Jill's new excuses are causing more confusion.

Welcome back to The Red Letter.

The timing couldn’t be worse.

Donald Trump’s approval ratings are underwater, below 40 percent in most polls. Voters remain frustrated by rising costs and exhausted by the daily chaos of Washington and the President is unapologetic. On paper, Democrats should be positioned to capitalize.

Instead, the party remains deeply unpopular itself with a 36 percent approval rating, accord to Pew.

Part of that is the reality of a polarized political system. Part of it is the absence of a compelling Democratic alternative. But part of it traces back to a wound Democrats still haven’t fully confronted: Joe Biden’s decision to seek reelection, the effort to shield him from scrutiny, and the spectacular collapse of that strategy on a debate stage in Atlanta.

The debate didn’t simply end Biden’s campaign. It shattered trust.

“The debate didn’t create concerns about Biden,” Jill Biden’s former White House press secretary Michael LaRosa told me on The Tara Palmeri Show. “The debate confirmed the concerns people had had for a year.”

Voters had been told not to believe what they were seeing. Concerns about Biden’s age were dismissed. Questions about his stamina were brushed aside. Reporters who raised them were accused of chasing right-wing narratives.

“They spent a year hiding him..They spent a year not engaging with the press, not doing press conferences, not taking questions,” LaRosa said.

Then tens of millions of Americans watched the debate and reached their own conclusions.

The result was more than a political setback. It became a credibility crisis.

That’s why Jill Biden’s new memoir matters. Not because Americans are eager to relitigate the debate. Most have already moved on. But because every new explanation forces voters to revisit a question that Democrats still seem reluctant to answer honestly: What exactly did the people closest to Joe Biden know, and when did they know it?

And before voters can trust what Democrats are promising about the future, they have to trust what Democrats are saying about the past.

That’s why LaRosa’s criticism isn’t really about her memoir. It’s about what happens when political leaders ask voters to ignore what they can plainly see.

“The problem is, when you decide to gaslight and you double down on this farce because everybody could see in front of their own eyes something was not right,” he said.

The campaign insisted Biden simply had a cold and ingested medicine that made him drowsy. Allies were dispatched to television studios. Surrogates assured voters that what they had witnessed was a one-off event.

Now, with Jill Biden describing a much more alarming reaction behind the scenes, fears that he was having a stroke on live T.V. LaRosa argues that the story has changed yet again.

“How do you improve your credibility if you’re now changing the way you paint the picture of that night?” he asked.

This comes just as the party is locked in a bitter debate over its own post-election autopsy. Critics argue it fails to honestly address Biden’s decision to run again, his delayed exit from the race, and the consequences that followed.

“The report is a joke, I mean, the DNC chair [Ken Martin], is a joke,” LaRosa said.

“It shows you this culture of fear, right? They are so scared to death to offend the Bidens or offend Kamala Harris. They’re unwilling to to go there. They’re unwilling to lay blame where it belongs.”

Whether voters agree with that characterization or not, it gets at a larger problem Democrats still haven’t solved. Trust is easier to lose than it is to regain.

The challenge facing Democrats today isn’t simply persuading voters that Trump is failing. It’s persuading voters that they themselves have learned from their own mistakes. And that’s where Jill Biden’s book becomes more than a personal memoir.

It becomes part of a larger argument over accountability.

If the debate was as shocking behind closed doors as she now says it was, voters naturally want to know why they were being told something different at the time.

If it wasn’t, then why tell the story this way now?

Either way, the questions linger.