Sally Quinn: This Was Elder Abuse, and Jill Biden’s the Abuser

Well, my my my. The Washington DC establishment sure seems determined to distance itself from the obvious media and political cover-up of the past four years. 

No one exemplifies that establishment as Sally Quinn does. Not only is Quinn the doyenne of DC ‘society,’ she also has a columnist gig at the Washington Post for decades. Quinn was married to legendary Post editor Ben Bradlee for 36 years until his death in 2014, and has long been a formidable figure in the nation’s capital, both politically and socially.

So when Sally Quinn throws someone under a bus, it means something — especially when that someone has been around DC as long as Quinn has. Quinn tells Tara Palmeri in a new and lengthy interview that the Bidens acted in an “unpatriotic” manner in attempting to extend their grasp on power, and Quinn knows who to blame:

Legendary Washington hostess Sally Quinn has long been a defender of the Washington establishment, but the news of President Joe Biden’s prostate cancer diagnosis has Sally on the offensive. Quinn pulls no punches in this wide-ranging interview, calling Biden “unpatriotic” and accusing the former first lady Jill Biden of being the enabler.

‘I blame Jill Biden for this,” Quinn said. “Jill Biden is his wife.”

“She clearly was in favor of his running and I just think it was a terrible disservice to the country.”

In the course of the interview, Quinn gets a lot more specific about her assessment of Jill’s work, emphasis mine:

I felt sorry for Joe Biden because I didn’t think she was protecting him. She wasn’t protecting him from himself. And after that hideous debate, right after the debate, they’re in the spin room and she got his hand up and they’re, victory, victory, we won, we won, it was great, great. And the next day he’s off in North Carolina making a victory speech. I thought, what were they watching? I thought it was just elder abuse really what they were putting him through.

And Quinn should know. Bradlee suffered late-stage dementia in his final years, with the final two years being especially tough on him and on Quinn. She finally put her foot down in the end “to protect his dignity,” and Quinn is clearly blaming Jill for putting power ahead of her husband’s own dignity. Even in her own observations, Quinn says that “it looks like the beginning of dementia to me.” Quinn also heard that the Bidens had more than one family debate over whether Joe should run again, and Quinn understands that “Jill was always very pro, and that’s what it was going to be.”

All of this is fine and good, but … where was Sally Quinn before now? Quinn doesn’t write nearly as much at the Post as she did before her husband’s death, but she still contributed a handful of columns to the Post during the Biden administration. Despite seeing all of these signs and hearing about all of these debates, Quinn never said a word about it — until three weeks after the June 27 presidential debate. She penned a lovely column about Bradlee’s life and decline from dementia in July 18, 2024, while starting it –pointedly — as “a story for Jill Biden.” (It’s worth reading; Quinn really is a good writer.)

But shouldn’t Quinn have been writing about Biden’s decline well before then, especially given her proximity and access? Perhaps it would have been uncomfortable, but this wasn’t a case of a mid-level politico needing to be eased out with dignity. The President of the United States was obviously becoming incapacitated, with potentially catastrophic consequences not to family dignity but the entire world. Wasn’t that worth a column, especially when a few brave Democrats like Dean Phillips tried to raise the alarm in 2023?

Palmeri challenges Quinn on this point and gets an odd answer:

Do you ever wish that you had written in your Washington Post column about this, what you had seen and what you knew?

No, I didn’t feel like piling on. I mean, I wasn’t covering him. And I finally did write the letter to Jill before he dropped out. I was only moved to do that because the situation had deteriorated so much. But I didn’t just feel like it was up to me to weigh in on that.

“Piling on”? Who was piling at all at that point? 

Kudos to Quinn for piling on now, though. It’s pretty useful … years after the country needed to know it. 

Tara’s entire interview is below. She’s doing some good work at Red Letter, so be sure to subscribe to her YouTube channel, and maybe consider her Substack as well.