Joe Biden is set to release a tell-all memoir this fall about a presidency he may not have even been running — and the same people who watched a mechanical autopen stamp his signature onto pardons and executive orders are supposed to believe he wrote a book himself.
The former president announced "Promise Me, America" in a video message Wednesday, promising to explain "the decisions I made and why I made them." Publisher Little, Brown and Company, which declined to release financial details, will drop the book on Nov. 17, two weeks after the midterms. Presidents typically land seven-figure deals for these memoirs. Follow the money: Biden is about to get paid to reshape a legacy that his own party blames for handing the White House back to Donald Trump.
The timing itself tells you everything. Biden initially indicated the book would drop in September — right before the midterms — which the New York Post reported enraged Democrats who feared it would be a distraction. Now it lands safely after the votes are counted. The Guardian framed the scheduling shift as a simple matter of Democrats wanting to "keep the fall campaign focused on the record of Donald Trump." Neither outlet pressed on why a former president's memoir needed to be strategically timed to avoid damaging his own party. When both parties agree the public shouldn't hear something until after an election, that's usually where the public gets sold out.
Then there's the question of authorship — and it isn't a joke. House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Jason Smith asked plainly: "Did the autopen write this too?" The Oversight Project's Mike Howell put it sharper: "You had someone else write it for you and then you had your name put on it." These aren't just cheap shots. Biden's White House used an autopen to sign official business, including pardons. Donald Trump famously hung a framed photo of the autopen device in place of Biden's portrait at the White House. If a machine was signing the president's name on clemency grants, Americans have a right to know who was programming the machine.
Jill Biden's own memoir, published in June, only deepened the credibility crisis. She wrote that during Biden's disastrous June 2024 debate against Trump, he seemed so weak and disoriented that she feared he was having a stroke. The White House told the public it was a cold. "There was never a satisfying enough explanation offered for Joe's debate performance, and a lot of people never got over it," she wrote. A 2025 book by Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson, "Original Sin," was subtitled "President Biden's Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again." The cover-up isn't a conspiracy theory — it's documented by the establishment's own reporters.
Biden, who turns 84 three days after the book hits shelves, has been diagnosed with metastatic prostate cancer. He said Wednesday that treatment is "going really well." He has otherwise kept a low profile since leaving office.
The book will reportedly cover COVID, the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, the Afghanistan withdrawal, and Ukraine — all moments where the autopen was presumably available and the president's faculties were in question. Biden wants Americans to buy his account of decisions he made. The open question is who was making them when he couldn't.
