WASHINGTON (AP) — When President Joe Biden and First Lady Jill Biden disagree, they don’t dig it out in front of other people. Instead, she says, they argue text-by-text — “fexting” as they call it.
Jill Biden told Harper’s Bazaar magazine in an interview that her divorce from her first husband taught her to be independent and that she taught her daughter and granddaughters that lesson.
She says she could soon be sharing the White House living space with a teenage granddaughter.
When Joe Biden was vice president, the pair decided to resolve disagreements by text message to avoid fighting in front of their Secret Service agents — calling it fexting.
After texting him recently in a fit of anger, he told her, “You realize this will go down in history. There will be a record of that,” she said. Presidential communications are preserved for the historical record. She told her interviewer, “I won’t tell you what I called him that time.”
The first lady appears on the cover of the June-July issue of the publication, available at newsstands on June 7. Harper’s Bazaar said it is the first time in its 155-year history that an American first lady has been featured so prominently.
Jill Biden was 18 when she married her first husband. But in her mid-20s, she was divorced for the first time in her life, alone and alone. The breakup was an emotional blow to her, as she had idolized her parents’ union and thought she would have a marriage that would last as long as theirs.
She graduated and became a teacher.
“I knew I would never put myself in that position again, where I didn’t feel like I had the finances to be alone, that I had to get the money through a divorce settlement,” she said.
“I drummed that into (my daughter), Ashley, ‘Be independent, be independent.’ And my granddaughters,” she said. “You must be able to stand on your own two feet.”
Jill Biden met the then sen. Joe Biden in 1975, and they married two years later.
She continued to teach during his rise in national politics, eventually becoming the first first lady with a paid job outside the White House. She matches her responsibilities as first lady to her twice-weekly class schedule at Northern Virginia Community College.
Granddaughter Naomi is engaged and is planning a wedding reception at the White House in November. Another granddaughter recently told the first lady that she was doing an internship in Washington and would like to move into the executive mansion before the summer.
“I’m going to raise a teenager?” exclaimed Jill Biden.
