First lady Dr. Jill Biden took a jab at President Donald Trump in an extensive cover story for Vogue, published Tuesday.
While the story walks through Dr. Biden's work urging the president to run again in 2020, it's what she's said about her husband's leadership as president that contrasts so significantly with the ex-president.
The way the community college professor put it, "people can breathe again" since Biden took over.
President Biden, who was also interviewed, recalled her efforts to get him to run.
"You gotta run. Because there's so much at stake," he recalled her saying.
"There was no real upside to living physically in the White House," Biden noted. "It's the greatest honor in the world…but there's no privacy. I think the same thing was sinking in with you about the state of the country," he said to Dr. Biden.
"During the campaign, I felt so much anxiety from people; they were scared," Dr. Biden told Vogue. "When I travel around the country now, I feel as though people can breathe again. I think that's part of the reason Joe was elected. People wanted someone to come in and heal this nation, not just from the pandemic, which I feel Joe did by, you know, getting shots in everybody's arms. But also...he's just a calmer president. He lowers the temperature."
The interview recalled the "collective trauma" that the United States has suffered through in the past several years. "and here's a calm, experienced, empathetic president, and here's a first lady who is driven, tireless, effortlessly popular, but also someone who reminds us of ourselves. She's selling a new vision for how our most fundamental institutions ought to work—infrastructure, education, public health—even as she goes to extraordinary lengths to keep a real-world job, to stay in touch with what makes her human and what matters most."
The profile from Vogue is the first of a first lady since Michelle Obama, a point of contention for former first lady Melania Trump, whose husband complained that she never graced the cover of the magazine. The reality, however, is that Mrs. Trump was offered a profile, but Mrs. Trump turned it down.
"Vogue said like, 'oh, we want to do a profile,'" Mrs. Trump was recorded saying in 2018. "'Profile? F*ck you, profile. I don't need no profile. Yeah, what I need another profile?' It might be a cover. I'm like, 'might be a cover? I don't give a f*ck about Vogue and any magazine.'"
Read the whole profile at Vogue and see the photos by photographer Annie Leibovitz.
