How Jill Biden Concealed the President’s Rapid Deterioration

Jill Biden assumed the role of First Lady with the benefit of decades of political experience, as a Senate wife and second lady. She had a front row seat to Michelle Obama’s masterful East Wing, and had co-led a major First Lady project, Joining Forces. Everything was primed for her to lead a substantive, memorable East Wing that left its own distinct impression on Americans.

But America in 2020 was in a darker, more polarized place than during the Obama years. Biden inherited an economically anxious country traumatized by COVID-19. Schools across the country were toggling between closures and online learning. Jill was one of the few messengers in the administration who resonated with mothers and teachers, who was a teacher herself., She quickly took up what she described as an unexpected “healing role.” Many states had shockingly low vaccination rates, and in the summer of 2021, Jill traveled to states like Mississippi and Tennessee telling communities their rates were “not enough.” Sometimes she got booed for the unwelcome message. “Well, you’re booing yourselves,” she told a crowd in Nashville, who then went silent.

Staff in her East Wing knew they weren’t getting a honeymoon period. The office would need to help transition the country back to normalcy at the same time as it launched its own projects and agenda. It was an ambitious goal. But Jill did not appoint superstars, she set up her office much like the Biden White House, filled with trusted friends and family retainer types, staffers whose careers had been built around the Bidens.

Looming over them all was Anthony Bernal, the fifty-something, square, dark-suited, veteran of Bidenland, and Jill Biden’s senior advisor. Bernal was Latino by background, a native of Tucson, Arizona, who had studied history at the University of Texas, and worked his way up in Democratic politics. He began working for the Bidens in 2008, and his forte was not policy or politicking but events. Even his critics acknowledged he had a gift for running polished, lively productions: campaign rallies, fundraisers, intricate foreign trips. While in Jill’s office he had the amorphous title of senior advisor, in the White House he was an assistant to the president, at the very top of the hierarchy. Bernal was blunt, domineering, and divisive.

He would be called, in the course of the next four years: part of the “cabal of the unhelpful,” the Biden “marriage counselor,” Jill’s “work husband,” “the loyalty police,” an office bully, and a top member of the Biden “Politburo,” the tight circle of aides who later allegedly concealed the president’s deterioration from the public and his cabinet.

Anthony Bernal adored Jill. Her political future was his. For Bernal, a second Biden term was a given, and he often floated ideas for Jill’s second East Wing. “He never stopped wanting to hold her purse,” said one insider. “I think he would crawl into the coffin with her.”

During the early weeks of Jill Biden’s tenure, her staff observed her relationship with Bernal, who appeared both the mastermind and enforcer of her approach. With time it would become clear that Jill’s choices—the events she attended, the strategy behind her travel schedule, the projects she took up, her interventions and her silences—were all fanatically devoted to propping up Joe.

At the outset, liberals especially hoped that Jill Biden would be Melania Trump’s opposite, an openly progressive, activist First Lady; these were oversize expectations for a woman who, up to that point, had kept a fairly traditional public persona as supportive political wife and mother, with a nonthreatening career as a teacher.

But over the course of four years, her First Ladyship unfolded as exceedingly narrow, even conservative. She never pursued a distinct project through which the public could get a sense of her—of her personality, what she cared about, and the texture of her beliefs and commitments. She stood steadfastly by her man and squeezed herself into such a narrow, Joe-centric persona that public opinion about the two of them essentially merged. In polls, both during and at the end of Joe’s presidency, a third of people viewed her unfavorably and a third had no opinion of her.

One by one, Biden’s staffers dialed into the emergency call. A disaster was barreling toward the Biden administration, and the purpose of the call was to discuss how to shield the First Lady. After two decades of war, the US military was withdrawing from Afghanistan, and Kabul was falling. In the span of just ten days in August, the Afghan government collapsed, the president fled in a helicopter, and a suicide bombing at Kabul airport killed 13 US soldiers and 170 civilians. The administration was bungling the withdrawal and struggled to evacuate American citizens and Afghan allies amid the chaos. Word spread across the city that the Taliban had kill lists of Afghan women activists, and hundreds of terrified women went into hiding. It was a dark moment for the Biden administration, and inside the East Wing, Afghanistan had become a third rail.

On the emergency call, staffers discussed halting events for Joining Forces, Jill’s joint initiative focused on supporting families of the Armed Forces that began under the Obama administration, and stopping all activities that might expose the First Lady to public anger or questioning about Afghanistan. “They had a huge fear of doing anything at bases, they were just petrified,” said the former staffer. “Even though this was when military communities needed support.” The catastrophic exit from Afghanistan was devastating to many veterans who had served there. Watching the Taliban regain power called into question the meaning of their sacrifice, and the government’s difficulty evacuating Afghan comrades who had fought with them felt like a betrayal.

Jill finally resumed visiting with military service members who had been involved in the withdrawal or their families. She traveled to Camp Lejeune, in North Carolina, where one of the young female soldiers killed in the Kabul airport attack had been based. But no one saw it because the East Wing, in a sharp departure from usual practice, had refused to allow press.

Since the 1990s, the East Wing had what could almost be called a compact with Afghan women. If there was any pocket of women’s activism in the world that the United States, particularly the Office of the First Lady owned and owed, it was Afghan women.

Hillary Clinton and Laura Bush mobilized their usual networks to mount independent missions to evacuate Afghan women. But while Hillary and Laura were hard at work, Jill Biden appeared to have gone missing. A calculation had been made in the East Wing that it would be damaging for her to address the fallout for Afghan women, even though Jill was uniquely placed to address the challenges facing them.

The Virginia community where the First Lady taught was a reception point and support hub for hundreds of Afghans evacuated after the fall of Kabul. The college was a longtime hub for Afghan women students; Jill had taught and worked with them herself. It was hard to understand why, as a First Lady who championed education and women, she had nothing to say. “Where are your outspoken voices on justice and education for women and girls of Afghanistan?” demanded an Afghan activist, addressing Jill, as well as Kamala Harris, the first female vice president

By the end of that turbulent summer, the East Wing also lost its chief of staff. Julissa Reynoso had the actual title, but it was Anthony Bernal who was calling the shots. At the end of July, only six months into the term, it was announced that she would be leaving, nominated by Biden as US ambassador to Spain.

Jill’s approach to being First Lady was to act as Joe’s lead messenger, and this suited Bernal, who had gained his knowledge of policy indirectly as a scheduler and advance man. Her activities never took him out of his comfort zone. Instead, Bernal excelled as the guardian of the Bidens’ privacy, and this made him indispensable and the sole staffer in the East Wing to hold real power. In the White House, said LaRosa, Bernal had unique latitude. “Bernal was her speechwriter, policy director, image maker, body person, personal assistant, press secretary, he was everything,” he said. “He was infinitely more powerful than the White House chief of staff.”

In early June 2024, Jill Biden flew across the Atlantic three times in the course of a week. She spent Monday, her seventy-third birthday, and the following two days at a courthouse in Wilmington, Delaware, at the federal trial of Hunter Biden, who was accused of lying about his drug use when buying a gun. On Thursday she flew to France to join the president for D-Day celebrations, and returned in less than twenty-four hours to be back at Hunter’s trial on Friday. The next day she flew back to France to join the president’s state visit. Joe was known to dislike it when she was absent and would grow ill-tempered when they were apart. Jill’s frenetic comings and goings that week attested to the long-running strains on her personally, dealing with the Bidens’ troubled family life while Joe did his job being president.