Jill Biden appeared to give her former president husband Joe a secret signal on The View after co-host Alyssa Farah Griffin asked a very risky question.
Biden, 82, was asked about Democrat insiders saying he’d suffered a sharp cognitive decline during his final year in office and began answering the question.
But after a few moments of relatively fluid speech the former president suddenly stopped and said: ‘I’ve spoken enough.’
Jill, who was sat beside her husband, picked up the answer without a beat, sparking theories she may have nudged him or kicked him under the table to shut him up.
The former first lady has long been accused of hiding her ailing husband away during his doomed 2024 presidential campaign and telling him not to stand down despite growing outrage over his clear mental decline.
But she angrily denied ‘sequestering’ him during Thursday’s live appearance on the ABC show.
Meanwhile, Biden was also seen sporting a mysterious band aid on his left hand.
The president was previously seen with a bruise on the same hand, sparking theories about whether he had undergone some kind of infusion for the benefit of his health.
When he was asked the question on his mental health, Biden awkwardly cut himself off mid-answer as he gave a halting and mumbling performance on the show.
Jill’s sudden interjection appeared rehearsed, as she added in her retort that she was infuriated by books about her husband’s struggles in office because ‘nobody saw how hard Joe worked.’
The conversation lingered on allegations of Biden’s mental cognition, with Whoopi Goldberg at one point minimizing his disastrous debate against Trump last June as ‘just a bad night.’
The awkward moment came after Biden was greeted warmly by The View hosts as he jogged out to the studio, in an apparent attempt to look sprightly as he re-entered the limelight.
But moments later, Biden had to clear a huge lump of phlegm from his throat and paused his sentence to deal with the unpleasant vocal issue.
Biden said he ‘wasn’t surprised’ Kamala Harris lost to Donald Trump in the 2024 race.
‘(Trump) still got seven million fewer votes’ than in their 2020 showdown, Biden said, adding that Trump went with ‘the sexist route’ during the campaign to ‘undercut’ Harris’ bid for the presidency.
Biden was welcomed with soft-ball questions as he began the interview, with Whoopi Goldberg asking him first off the bat: ‘Well, how are you?’
Ana Navarro also quipped that he could serve as the ‘next Pope’, seemingly digging at Trump’s meme of himself becoming the next papal leader amid the ongoing Conclave.
The interview is a rare public appearance for Biden since he left the presidency almost four months ago.
This week, he gave his first solo interview to BBC Radio 4’s Today program, where he claimed he took so long to bow out of the 2024 presidential race because he was so ‘successful’ in office before implying Harris would have lost anyway.
Biden also raised eyebrows with his appearance at the funeral of Pope Francis last month, as he was seen gripping a priest’s arm as he struggled to walk down a set of stairs.
In his interview earlier this week, Biden whispered, mumbled, coughed, and paused for long moments as he conducted his first broadcast since leaving office.
When asked why he did not end his 2024 campaign earlier, he said: ‘I don’t think it would have mattered.’
Much of Biden’s presidency was overshadowed by questions about his cognitive state. After a disastrous debate against Donald Trump on June 27 last year he took nearly a month to finally end his reelection bid, finally calling time on July 21.
That gave Harris just 106 days to build-out a presidential campaign, and she ultimately lost to Trump in November.
‘It’s a question lots of people ask you, Mr. President – did you leave it too late? Should you have withdrawn earlier, given someone else a bigger chance?’ BBC journalist Nick Robinson asked.
‘We left at a time when we had a good candidate,’ Biden said of Harris in the interview that aired Wednesday morning. ‘She was fully funded.’
‘And what happened was, what we had set out to do, no one thought we could do,’ the former president added. ‘We had become so successful in our agenda, it was hard to say, ‘I’m gonna stop now.”
Biden also took the opportunity to hit out at his successor Donald Trump, accusing him of ‘modern-day appeasement’ in his attempts to end the Russia-Ukraine War.
‘What the hell’s going on here? What president ever talks like that?’ he added about Trump’s plans to annex Greenland and Canada.
‘That’s not who we are,’ he continued. ‘We’re about freedom, democracy, opportunity, not about confiscation.’
The ex-president struggled throughout the interview to properly articulate his thoughts, refusing to address Trump by his name.
He also mumbled and took long pauses, sighing heavily and speaking in a whisper at times.
Biden also voiced his worries about relations between US-Europe declining under the Trump administration, as Allied nations marked the 80th anniversary of VE Day this week.
He called it ‘foolish’ to think Putin would concede if parts of Ukraine were given in a peace deal.
The appearance on The View also comes as a diary Jill Biden reportedly kept during their time in the White House is set to be used in a tell-all book.
The former First Couple have faced a slew of embarrassing articles and books on Biden’s decline in office, and Biden is said to have been preparing a book to combat the allegations.
Insiders told the Daily Mail the couple could land a book deal worth $30 million.