https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2024/09/the-self-aggrandizement-of-jill-biden/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=featured-content-trending&utm_term=third
On the tenure of Dr. President
President Joe Biden’s announcement on July 21 that he would not run for reelection after all upended an already volatile campaign. As media pivoted to cover the likely nomination of Biden’s vice president, Kamala Harris, as the Democratic Party’s candidate, attention shifted away from Biden himself, forestalling efforts to unravel what has been going on in the White House as he has physically and cognitively declined. But it shouldn’t. The American people deserve to know what has been happening behind the scenes of this obfuscatory administration — and the role played by one person in particular: First Lady Jill Biden.
Jill Biden has long claimed to be her husband’s fiercest advocate. Immediately after the president’s disastrous debate performance against Donald Trump in June, she ushered him off the stage and to a local Waffle House, where the president, glassy-eyed and fatigued, pantomimed the motions of a retail politician. Then, at a debate-watch party, he stood beside the podium as Jill attempted to rally the faithful by telling him, “Joe, you did such a great job. . . . You answered every question!” while he stared vacantly into the crowd. Her words sounded both condescending and chilling given Biden’s alarming, confused debate performance. A week spent by the White House trying to reassure Democratic Party stalwarts and especially important donors that the president remains fit to serve failed to quell doubts. At a Hamptons fundraiser a few days after the debate, the first lady was adamant: “Joe isn’t just the right person for the job. He’s the only person for the job.”
Then came the cover of Vogue — not Jill Biden’s first, of course; she has been featured twice before. But this one, published after the debate, pictures her in a $5,000 Ralph Lauren coatdress that several media outlets called “suffragette white.” The first lady looks off into the middle distance with a stoic, expertly airbrushed expression, above an unintentionally revealing headline: “We will decide our future.”
Given the involvement of the first lady in the Biden administration’s promotion of its policies and, until recently, the president’s stubborn refusal to acknowledge his declining condition and popularity, it is worth asking: Who is the “we” in this statement? On social media, critics of the administration often call Jill “Lady MacBiden,” and anyone who does not slavishly follow the mainstream media will have heard Jill compared to Edith Wilson, wife of Woodrow, who effectively ran the nation for her husband while hiding the severity of his physical condition from the American people. That comparison may be apt, but her behavior as second lady and first lady is also reminiscent of another wife of a prominent politician, albeit not an American one: Madame Chiang Kai-shek, wife of the Nationalist Chinese leader.
True, when Jill wants to get out of town, she flees to her house in Rehoboth Beach, Del., with a contingent of family members and Secret Service agents, not to exile in Taiwan with crates full of purloined priceless art, as Madame Chiang did, but the two first ladies have certain similarities. Madame Chiang could be both charming and vicious, as her New York Times obituary noted, and she took the lead in managing policy proposals for her husband, often serving as his translator (she spoke impeccable English). Madame Chiang was also a fierce advocate of her husband and his Nationalist cause, although after meeting her, then–first lady Eleanor Roosevelt noted, “She can talk beautifully about democracy, but she does not know how to live democracy.” She and her husband were, after all, shockingly corrupt.
