Teacher Jill Biden embraces limelight in surprise Ukraine trip
WASHINGTON: She prefers the classroom to the limelight, but with a surprise trip into Ukraine, First Lady Jill Biden embraced her role as the face of her husband’s administration on the biggest story of the day. Jill Biden, known in government circles by her title’s acronym FLOTUS, has made history since Joe Biden took office in January 2021 simply by keeping her outside job as a teacher-a previously unheard of determination for a first lady to maintain a normal life beyond the White House fence.
Swooping across the border Sunday from Slovakia to the town of Uzhhorod, Biden, 70, entered a different kind of history as arguably the highest-profile US visitor to Ukraine since Russia invaded on February 24. It’s a journey that many foreign leaders and important US officials like Secretary of State Antony Blinken have made, but still considered too risky for Joe Biden himself. The last US first lady in a warzone was George H.W. Bush’s wife, Laura, who went to Afghanistan in 2008.
And while politicians arrive in Ukraine mostly to talk about weapons, money and logistics, Jill Biden applied her personal stamp-a Mother’s Day visit where she embraced President Volodymyr Zelensky’s wife Olena Zelenska, who has been in hiding for her security since the war began.
“I thought it was important to show the Ukrainian people that this war has to stop,” Jill Biden said, “and that the people of the United States stand with the people of Ukraine.” Zelenska, a first lady who before the war worked on educational and gender equality issues, had previously written to Jill Biden to discuss her fears over the emotional toll for Ukrainians, a spokesman for Biden told The New York Times.
‘I don’t really care’
Although she frequently tours on behalf of the administration domestically and now, with Ukraine, has stepped into the foreign policy realm, Jill Biden is a reluctant celebrity. Her decision to keep teaching English at Northern Virginia Community College underpins a broad shift from the Trump years.
Jill Biden’s predecessor Melania Trump came to the United States as a Slovenian fashion model, before meeting playboy real estate entrepreneur Donald Trump and, decades later, entering the White House as a style-conscious but largely distant, even frosty persona.
Melania Trump was arguably never higher profile than on a 2018 trip to the Mexican border, where Trump had ordered agents to separate arriving children from parents in a bid to dissuade illegal immigration.