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.
‘The East Wing: Power, Intrigue, and the Untold Story of America’s First Ladies’ by Azadeh Moaveni
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.
