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It's just what any woman needs when she's under immense, global, skull-cracking pressure: your ex-husband to weigh in with some unsolicited criticism.
Bill Stevenson, who was married to Jill Biden decades ago, from 1970 to 1975, decided to have a chat to reporters this week, proffering his view that Jill Biden has changed. She's "not the same person I married", he told a reporter. "She's matriculated into a completely different woman."
Leaving aside the dubious use of the word matriculated, Stevenson, a Trump supporter, says he can't understand why his ex is still supporting her husband, "since it appears that he's struggling" (which is surely precisely the time you should support your spouse?).
Half a century after he broke up with Jill, Stevenson says there are "no hard feelings", but that his wife had "always been very driven" (except the bit where she had totally changed into a different person) and that "people say she's the one who wants to be president now". Can't wait for his entirely objective, up-coming, self-published book "The Bidens: The Early Years".
Why mention Stevenson? Aren't his views kind of irrelevant? Yes, and that's the point – there's a lot of smoke, a lot of baloney around right now, millions of views and takes, well-meaning and hostile, being proffered about the suitability of Joe Biden to be American president for second term after a shockingly poor, rambling and unfocused performance at the first candidate's debate.
Can Biden hear the truth?
The calls for Biden to stand aside for a younger, sharper candidate have come from all corners of the globe, the country and the media-sphere, from the New York Times to The Economist. Concerns about his age were cemented, going from pressing to urgent. The polls tilted further to Trump.
But Biden raised his fist in response.
"I know I'm not a young man, to state the obvious," he said at a rally in North Carolina afterwards, as the crowd roared approval. "I don't speak as smoothly as I used to. I don't debate as well as I used to. But I know what I do know. I know how to tell the truth."
But the vital questions are: can Biden hear the truth? And who will he listen to?
This is why, in the past few days, spotlights have narrowed and focused on one face above others: Jill Biden. Will she do what is right for her husband, the country? And what will this mean? Shielding him, pulling him out of the race and protecting him from being exposed as less a commanding leader and more a "well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory", as special counsel put it earlier this year? Or steadying his arm – literally – and staying the course, insisting he can win, continuing to ignore the polls, continuing a decades long quest of trying to deliver him his dreams?
Cue the headlines: "Jill Biden delusional after debate drama", "Jill Biden 'not coming across well' on a 'human level' amid husband Joe's struggles", "Only Jill Biden can save Joe Biden's presidency", "Jill Biden treats Joe like 'toddler' after debate".
This last headline has some truth. At a post-debate rally in Atlanta, Jill Biden articulated a very low bar for a presidential performer, saying to her husband: "Joe, you did such a great job! You answered every question! You knew all the facts!"
The day after the debate, she told donors at a fundraiser in NYC that the president had told her: "'You know, Jill, I don't know what happened. I didn't feel that great." She responded: "Look, Joe, we are not going to let 90 minutes define the four years that you've been president.'" She added, in a now familiar refrain: "When he gets knocked down, Joe gets back up, and that's what we're doing today."
A tough call at Camp David
It's been a particularly intense week for Jill Biden. Whilst continuing to campaign, in Pennsylvania and Michigan she has tried to reassure people it was all just a blip.
The first presidential wife to continue her own career, earning a doctorate at age 55, and teaching English at a community college, also just appeared on the cover of Vogue in a pricey Ralph Lauren silk tuxedo dress, next to a tag-line reading, "We will decide our future".
The fact that Jill Biden is widely recognised as the president's closest adviser should not be surprising, yet is often cast as having sinister overtones, with headlines like, "Cruel Jill Clings to Power".
Watching the president stumble, mumble, fade, and equivocate, the words "elder abuse" began circulating and on social media viewers could not help but wonder why she wasn't better preserving his legacy and his dignity.
After the debate, Joe Biden's family circled him at Camp David to assess the ferocious, near unanimous, condemnation of his performance, and reportedly all agreed he should keep campaigning, with son Hunter "among the most vocal". (Hunter, of all people, a man who has just been found guilty of three felony gun charges, hoist by his own memoir in which he detailed the timeline of his drug addiction, matched to the time he bought a gun and lied about drug use on a federal background check form.)
As I discussed with my Not Stupid podcast co-host Jeremy Fernandez this week, it was a tough call, but was it truthful?
This family has suffered, and conquered, suffered again and now seem to be bloody minded about the pursuit of a second term. The dynamics of a family riven with trauma, tragedy and addiction seem to be inspiring a perverse doggedness and loyalty.
Jill has encouraged Joe not to run before
Think of the deeper currents in Jill Biden's life: she marries Joe at 26, not long after his first wife and baby daughter died in a car accident, raises his two sons Beau and Hunter, alongside the daughter, Ashley, that she and Joe have together, as her husband works steadily in, and towards, the highest echelons of political life. In 1988, the year he runs for president for the first time, Joe Biden survives two brain aneurysms.
She has watched as public service has somehow sustained him during his darkest times.
Still, Jill Biden has encouraged her husband not to run before, most memorably in 2003. In her memoir, Where the Light Enters, she writes about a day where she was lying by the pool in a bikini as inside her house, key Democrats were urging Joe to begin campaigning for president. She got a felt pen and wrote "no" on her stomach, then walked through the middle of the meeting. Bikini diplomacy worked.
In 2015, horribly, Beau dies of brain cancer at 46. Hunter, who has spent his adult life years addicted to drugs, begins a relationship with Beau's widow Hallie whilst separating from his first wife, introducing her to crack cocaine.
When Biden declared he would run for president in 2019, his daughter Ashley was also wrestling with serious drug addiction, and Hunter was still hooked on crack and alcohol. As reported in Axios, she called her father a week before the 2020 debate and told him she had relapsed. He cried.
We know this, and too much more than we should know because Ashley had her diary stolen from a friend's house by a woman who has just been jailed for selling the contents of the diary to a right wing group called Project Veritas, actions the judge called "despicable".
Imagine existing as a daughter, in such an environment, under a spotlight she has called "cruel" and "dehumanising", even before her diaries were stolen. In a statement to the court, published by the New York Times, Ashley wrote:
LoadingThe defendant's actions constitute one of the most heinous forms of bullying, not to mention a complete violation of my privacy and personal dignity. After being the victim of a crime in my early twenties, I developed PTSD. The journal that was stolen was part of my efforts to heal. I am a private citizen, targeted only because my father happened to be running to be President.
A crucial question remains
It's an astonishing amount of pain and brokenness to stomach in any family, let alone one hitched to a president. Little wonder the obvious trauma of, and attacks on his family distract the president, Axios reports, and brings "impenetrable sadness."
When Biden announced he was running in 2019, his daughter wrote of her anxiety and said: "We are running".
The "we" is important. Reportedly, none of the kids have wanted to be the reason he wouldn't run.
So sitting in that family group with Joe Biden after he bombed the debate, you can imagine the hunched shoulders, the loyal indignation, the guilt, the resentment, the setting of jaws.
Over and over again, Biden says: "I have known what it means to fall down and get back up again."
This is true, but the question remains: at what cost? To his health, to his family, to his party, possibly the country?
Many will be wishing Jill could dig out that felt pen again.
Julia Baird is co-host of the Not Stupid podcast with Jeremy Fernandez.