(Washington) One day she holds her husband’s hand firmly at the Élysée, another that of their son Hunter leaving the court… In the middle of the campaign, first lady Jill Biden is more than ever the center of gravity of the family of the American president, with a painful history.
Tuesday, she was there, in Wilmington (Delaware, east), alongside the president’s youngest son whom a jury had just found guilty in a case of illegal possession of a weapon.
Jill Biden, 73, has been a near-constant presence in the courtroom, not hesitating to cross the Atlantic back and forth.
In court last Wednesday, Joe Biden’s wife took the plane to attend Thursday the ceremonies commemorating the 1944 Allied landings in Normandy. On Friday, first lady Jill Biden was back alongside Hunter Biden in Delaware.
On Saturday, she was in Paris again for the state visit of the American president. In the evening, there was no apparent fatigue or tension on Jill Biden’s face when she posed, upright in her long blue velvet dress, before a banquet at the Élysée.
This English teacher, invariably smiling and warm in public, never lets anything appear that could damage the image of her husband or her family.
While the 81-year-old Democrat’s gait becomes ever stiffer and his speech more awkward, Jill Biden often takes his arm or hand, as if to guide his steps or his conversation.
Jill Biden entered Joe Biden’s life in 1975. She was then separated from her first husband and the Delaware senator was a young widower, father of two boys, Beau and Hunter.
Their mother, the first wife of the American president, died in 1972 in a car accident, and with her the couple’s little daughter, still a baby.
The politician with the broad smile and the beginning of baldness assiduously courts the young blonde woman with blue eyes, whom he noticed on an advertising billboard.
It will take five marriage proposals before she accepts.
Beau and Hunter Biden “had lost their mom, and I didn’t want them to lose another mom. So I had to be 100% sure,” she explained later.
The couple then had a daughter, Ashley.
When eldest son Beau died in 2015 from brain cancer, when Joe Biden—then vice president—plunged into such grief that he would later say he considered suicide, when Hunter slipped into addiction on crack, Jill Biden, at least in appearance, has not weakened.
Once her husband arrived at the White House in 2021, she took on the fairly stereotypical role of first lady who oversees decoration and menus while dealing with unifying issues – helping military families, promoting reading…
According to the press, the first lady also plays a role, if not that of an omnipresent advisor, at least that of a political compass, and it is generally accepted that without her green light, Joe Biden would not have decided to run again against his Republican predecessor Donald Trump.
Not only did the first lady agree, but she is now actively participating in the campaign, traveling the country to raise funds and, from time to time, making statements that contrast with her usually smooth tone.
“Americans will choose good over evil,” she recently declared, for example, in reference to the November duel between her husband and Donald Trump.
