Former President Joe Biden posted a video to X on Wednesday announcing a presidential memoir titled "Promise Me, America", and within hours, the announcement had become a punchline. Conservatives, media figures, and even a former reality TV star piled on, reviving pointed questions about who was actually running the Biden White House and whether a president who relied on a mechanical signature device to sign pardons could credibly claim to have written a book.
The memoir, set for release on November 17, roughly two weeks after the midterm elections, will chronicle Biden's single term and reveal what a press release called the "deeply agonizing calculation" behind his decision to withdraw from the 2024 presidential race. Breitbart reported that Biden received a $10 million advance from publisher Little, Brown and Company and plans a national book tour.
But the timing, the authorship claims, and Biden's well-documented decline turned what was supposed to be a dignified reentry into public life into something closer to a roast.
The sharpest line of attack centered on Biden's use of an autopen, a device that mechanically reproduces a signature, to sign official documents during his presidency. President Trump has raised the issue repeatedly, claiming Biden "didn't know what documents he was signing" and that "thousands of pardons were void" because of the practice. Trump replaced Biden's portrait in the Presidential Walk of Fame with an image of the autopen itself.
That backdrop made Biden's claim in his announcement video, that he had personally written a book, an irresistible target. Fox News Digital reported that the mockery was swift and broad, spanning elected officials, conservative commentators, and online personalities.
Rep. Jason Smith, the Missouri Republican, posted two words on X: "Did the autopen write this too." Florida congressional candidate Mark Kaye was even more economical: "Auto pen."
Conservative communicator Steve Guest framed the problem with surgical precision:
"The first lie of Joe Biden's book launch: 'I've written a book.'"
Daily Wire editor-in-chief Brent Scher posed the question many were thinking: "Who do we think wrote this book." Outkick founder Clay Travis went further, tying the book's post-midterm release date to Democratic strategy:
"Joe Biden couldn't sign his own pardons. Now he's 'written' a book, which Democrats forced him to release after the midterms so he wouldn't be in the news to remind people how bad he was. Who in the world is buying this book?"
Former Deputy Assistant Attorney General Tom Dupree, appearing on Fox News's "Fox Report," warned that "strange things were afoot" during Biden's presidency, a reference to the growing body of evidence that Biden's capacity was far more diminished than the White House ever publicly acknowledged.
Biden used the same announcement video to address his health, stating that he has been receiving treatment for a cancer diagnosis and that it has been going "really well." The Washington Examiner reported that Biden, now 83, publicly disclosed the cancer diagnosis for the first time in the video promoting the memoir.
AP News identified the diagnosis as prostate cancer. Biden's full quote from the video: "I've been spending a lot of time with my family. I'm dealing with a cancer diagnosis, been getting treatment, and it's going really well."
The cancer revelation adds another layer to a health narrative that Biden's allies spent years trying to suppress. Former First Lady Jill Biden wrote in her own memoir that Joe Biden seemed so weak and disoriented during the June 2024 presidential debate that she feared he was having a stroke. As Jill Biden's memoir reopened the debate debacle, it also confirmed what millions of viewers saw with their own eyes that night, a president who appeared unable to complete his own sentences on a national stage.
Jill Biden herself later acknowledged the gap between the White House's public assurances and reality. "There was never a satisfying enough explanation offered for Joe's debate performance, and a lot of people never got over it," she wrote.
The question of how White House doctors missed Biden's cancer diagnosis remains unanswered, and the memoir's announcement only sharpens it. If Biden was too impaired to sign his own name on official documents, what does that say about the integrity of every executive action taken during his final months in office?
Nathan Brand, writing on X, captured the broader frustration: "Could you imagine if this guy was halfway through his second term. it's still insane to me that so many people lied about this man's health to hold onto power."
The mockery wasn't limited to the right. The New York Post reported that late-night host Jimmy Fallon took a dig at the memoir, joking that Kamala Harris wrote the epilogue. More telling was the reaction from former Democratic fundraiser Lindy Li, who suggested her former party wants Biden to disappear.
"They're thinking, Why can't you just shut the f--- up? Prior to me leaving the party, they wanted nothing to do with this guy."
Li's comment, from someone who once raised money for Democrats, points to a party that pushed Biden out of the 2024 race, skipped a formal goodbye, and now watches his reemergence with something between embarrassment and dread. New Mexico Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham, a Democrat, was similarly dismissive, telling reporters: "I don't need to be distracted about anyone's book."
The Biden family's return to public life has a way of resurfacing the scandals Democrats wanted left behind. The autopen. The cognitive decline. The debate collapse. The insistence by senior officials that everything was fine when it plainly was not.
Spencer Pratt, the former reality TV star who ran for mayor of Los Angeles, offered the most colorful theory about the book's real purpose. "This guy couldn't even sign his own name. He's not writing books. LMAO," he posted on X. In a second post, Pratt went further:
"Politicians write books to launder money. Nobody wants to read this, but the corrupt NGOs he provided for as President will buy up 100K copies and burn 'em to hold up their end of the bribes."
Pratt's claims are unverified, but the broader skepticism about political memoirs as financial vehicles is well established. A $10 million advance for a book by an 83-year-old former president whose own party forced him off the ticket raises obvious questions about who the real audience is, and what the real transaction looks like.
Then there's the timing. The November 17 release date lands safely after the midterms, a detail Clay Travis and others flagged as deliberate. Democrats, it appears, did not want Biden's face on cable news during election season. The man they once called the soul of the nation has become a liability they'd rather schedule around.
Biden's video announcement struck a different tone, naturally. He described the memoir as covering "the challenges we face as a nation and about the decisions I made and why I made them, leading the country through co rebuilding our economy and restoring our democracy after the attack on January 6th, ending our nation's longest war in Afghanistan, strengthening NATO and supporting Ukraine."
Fox News Digital reached out to both the Office of Joe Biden and the White House for comment. Neither response was noted in the reporting.
Meanwhile, the debate over Biden's fitness continues to deepen. Jill Biden has confirmed that her husband will live with stage 4 cancer permanently and has acknowledged that he has slowed down, an admission that would have been unthinkable from the Biden inner circle just two years ago.
Just The News reported that Rep. Nancy Mace, the South Carolina Republican, posed her own question about the memoir: "How many chapters are about your time hiding in the basement while someone else ran the White House?"
Biden's book promises to address the "deeply agonizing calculation" behind stepping aside in 2024. What it almost certainly won't address is the more fundamental question: who was making the calculations, agonizing or otherwise, during the months and years when the president of the United States could not reliably hold a pen?
The autopen wasn't a convenience. It was a symptom. And no ghostwritten memoir, however handsomely advanced, can sign that problem away.