If only the memories of Joe Biden’s presidency could disappear this quickly.
Former First Lady Jill Biden’s memoir, “View from the East Wing,” has been mocked plenty since its June 2 release. But nothing captures the book’s collapse quite like this: After debuting at No. 1 on the New York Times Best Sellers list, it vanished from the list altogether just a few weeks later.
That is enough to make a person wonder whether something about that big debut was a little off.
As it turns out, there was at least one reason to be skeptical. And this time, The New York Times itself left the clue sitting in plain sight.
As the New York Post reported Monday, Jill Biden’s memoir debuted at No. 1 with a dagger symbol next to it. That symbol indicates bulk purchases.
Take a second to appreciate the irony. The New York Times, the same institution that did everything it could to avoid dealing honestly with Joe Biden’s obvious decline for as long as possible, ended up flagging the suspicious part of Jill Biden’s book success itself.
To be fair, bulk purchases are common with celebrity authors and major book tours. Jill Biden announced just such a tour on Facebook in April. Publicist Lauren Cobello, founder of Leverage with Media PR, told the Post that “it’s almost impossible to not have bulk orders” when celebrities are involved, since bookstores hosting author events often buy hundreds of copies ahead of time.
Fine. That may explain how the book got a strong opening.
But it also raises an obvious question: How much of that “best seller” status reflected genuine public demand, and how much of it came from the machinery built around selling the book?
Once that initial wave passed, the book’s momentum collapsed. According to the New York Post, it fell to No. 3 in its second week. On the latest list, dated July 5, it was gone entirely.
That does not exactly suggest Americans were lining up to revisit the Biden years through Jill Biden’s eyes.
And why would they be? The Biden presidency left behind inflation, border chaos, foreign policy embarrassment, public confusion, and a steady stream of moments that made Americans wonder who was really making decisions in the White House.
One of the people who did read the book was Vahaken Mouradian, literary editor of National Review. Judging from his review, the most notable part was already widely discussed: Jill Biden wrote that she thought her husband might be suffering a stroke during his disastrous June 27, 2024, debate against Donald Trump.
That admission should have raised even more questions than it did.
If she genuinely believed her husband might have been having a medical emergency on national television, then why did the campaign continue as if the main problem was optics? Why was he sent back out into the political arena instead of being removed from it immediately?
The answer is not flattering.
The Bidens spent years insisting that Joe Biden was sharp, capable, and fully in command, even as millions of Americans could see the opposite with their own eyes. Jill Biden was not a bystander in that effort. She was one of the people closest to him, and one of the most visible figures defending the fiction.
So when her memoir briefly landed at the top of the bestseller list, only to fall off soon after, it felt less like a literary triumph and more like another carefully managed Biden production.
Bulk purchases may not be scandalous by themselves. But they do fit the pattern. With the Bidens, the presentation is often cleaner than the reality. The branding comes first, and the public is expected not to ask too many questions.
Hunter Biden turned trading on the family name into an art form, but he was never the only Biden to benefit from Joe Biden’s political career. The family’s entire public life has been built around proximity to power, and Jill Biden’s book rollout hardly looks like an exception.
However many copies were printed, there may be plenty left over soon enough.
Getting rid of the books is easy.
Getting rid of the damage left by Joe Biden’s presidency will take much longer.