It was August 2021, and the disastrous fall of Kabul was underway, with the Taliban marching on the Afghan capital after President Joe Biden’s chaotic withdrawal of US troops.
Everyone was mobilizing to try and help Afghans who had worked with the US military to escape, and former US first ladies were leaping into action. They had historically supported female empowerment in the country, aware that standing up for the rights of Afghan women was a cause that few could quibble with.
But even as rumors swirled that ‘kills lists’ of female Afghan activists were circulating, one emergency call at the White House allegedly had a different priority: how to shield First Lady Jill Biden from any political fallout.
‘Hillary Clinton and Laura Bush mobilized their usual networks to mount independent missions to evacuate Afghan women,’ author Azadeh Moaveni writes in a new book. ‘But while Hillary and Laura were hard at work, Jill Biden appeared to have gone missing.’
The call is detailed in The East Wing: Power, Intrigue, and the Untold Story of America’s First Ladies, in which Moaveni traces Jill’s time in the position from its promising start to her alleged Lady Macbeth-esque role trying to keep her ailing husband in power when he was up for re-election.
Less than a year before the Kabul incident, the omens had been good when Jill’s husband won the 2020 election, inheriting a country with a population that was bruised, exhausted and economically depressed after the Covid-19 pandemic and a tumultuous Trump presidency.
Schools and families were struggling to get back to normal, but ‘Jill was one of the few messengers in the administration who resonated with mothers and teachers, who was a teacher herself,’ Moaveni writes. She was also politically seasoned, having been at the side of her husband during his career as a senator then serving as Second Lady when he was Vice President to Barack Obama.
But there were early signs that her allegiances were not primarily to the American people, Moaveni claims, but to a husband she had married when she was 26 years old, and to a family which had gone through intense personal turmoil and tragedy.
A new book traces Jill’s time as First Lady from its promising start to her alleged Lady Macbeth-esque role trying to keep her ailing husband in power
There were early signs that Jill’s allegiances were not primarily to the American people, Moaveni claims, but to her husband
Jill was politically seasoned, having been at the side of her husband during his career as a senator then serving as Second Lady when he was Vice President to Barack Obama
During Joe Biden’s campaign for the presidency, Jill had visited the squalid Matamoros migrant encampment in Mexico just over the US border and penned an emotional op-ed in the Wall Street Journal asking, ‘is this what we have become?’ in Trump’s America.
But within months of Biden assuming office, with migration on the southern border proving unpopular with voters, she quietly abandoned her initiative to reunite migrant families, a pattern she would repeat throughout her husband’s presidency, The East Wing claims.
‘Most First Ladies were like this to a degree. But Jill was singular in the way she subsumed herself into Joe’s presidency,’ writes Moaveni.
‘She supported only causes that made him look good and abandoned them the moment they didn’t. Any subject that proved awkward to the Biden administration she would generally avoid, even when it related directly to her brand as an educator and an advocate for women.’
Case in point, at the time of the aforementioned fall of Kabul, Jill was involved in an initiative called Joining Forces which supported military families, but in their hour of need, her team had other priorities, the book claims, which was to stop ‘all activities that might expose the First Lady to public anger.’
‘They had a huge fear of doing anything at bases, they were just petrified,’ a former staffer told Moaveni. ‘Even though this was when military communities needed support.’
Jill put out a statement mourning the loss of lives a day after a suicide bomb at Kabul airport killed 13 US Service members and more than 170 Afghan civilians, telling military families: ‘My heart is with you as you navigate what comes next.’
She avoided any mention of the political ramifications of the withdrawal at the time, although she acknowledged in her recent biography, View From The East Wing, that the fall of Kabul was a ‘turning point for Joe’s administration.’
Jill’s unerring loyalty can be traced back, Moaveni writes, to the start. When she married Joe in 1977, she inherited a family marked by tragedy. Biden’s wife Neilia and their 13-month-old daughter Naomi were killed in a car accident five years earlier.
Their sons Hunter and Beau survived, and Jill had the difficult task of becoming ‘both stepmother and substitute mother, tending to their lives as Joe commuted to Washington to build his political career.’
In 1981, Jill and Joe’s daughter, Ashley, was born, but personal upheaval and tragedy followed the three children into adulthood. Beau died of brain cancer in 2015. Both Hunter and Ashley struggled with addiction, with Hunter’s very public meltdowns triggering a string of crises for the Bidens.
Jill was loyal from the start, Moaveni writes, when she became ‘both stepmother and substitute mother,’ to Hunter Biden and Beau Biden, who died in 2015
In 1981, Jill and Joe’s daughter, Ashley, was born, but personal upheaval and tragedy followed her into adulthood
Both Hunter and Ashley struggled with addiction, with Hunter’s very public meltdowns triggering a string of crises for the Bidens
The book details how Joe and Jill initially refused to publicly acknowledge the existence of a little granddaughter called Navy Roberts, whom Hunter Biden had fathered between his marriages. It took a scathing New York Times article in 2023 for them to relent and speak about her.
The article by Maureen Dowd said the Bidens’ reluctance to publicly embrace the child ‘reveals is how dated and inauthentic the 80-year-old president’s view of family is.’
A few weeks later, Joe Biden put out a statement saying he and Jill wanted the best for all their grandchildren, ‘including Navy,’ but it was ‘not a political issue, it’s a family matter.’ Jill’s recent biography is dedicated to her daughter and her granddaughters, but Navy is not listed among them.
The controversy highlighted how tangled their family life had become.
‘Both Bidens were carrying out their roles while parenting adult children on the brink – of relapse into addiction, of legal and financial ruin,’ writes Moaveni.
This desire to protect the family’s privacy led to a number of political decisions, including the appointment of Anthony Bernal as Jill’s senior advisor, a powerful gatekeeper variously described as Jill’s ‘work husband,’ and the Biden ‘marriage counsellor.’
His overriding attribute? Fierce loyalty to the Biden clan, and to Jill in particular.
‘He never stopped wanting to hold her purse,’ one insider told Moaveni. ‘I think he would crawl into the coffin with her.’
The book goes on: ‘Jill’s approach to being First Lady was to act as Joe’s lead messenger, and this suited Bernal. Her activities never took him out of his comfort zone. Instead, Bernal excelled as the guardian of the Bidens’ privacy, and this made him indispensable and the sole staffer in the East Wing to hold real power.’
But by keeping a tight cabal of long-time loyalists and ‘Biden people’ around her rather than innovative thinkers, Jill was left with ‘an aura of blandness,’ the book observes: ‘They were all respected hands but not the sort of brilliant policy minds, politicos and PR A-listers that Michelle Obama had brought in.’
The result was an uninspiring tenure as First Lady in which projects including the migration initiative and funding for community colleges were championed then quietly dropped.
‘Jill’s approach to being First Lady was to act as Joe’s lead messenger,’ writes Moaveni
Jill’s desire to protect the family’s privacy led to the number of political decisions, including the appointment of Anthony Bernal, as Jill’s senior advisor, a powerful gatekeeper
!['[Jill] supported only causes that made him look good and abandoned them the moment they didn't,' writes Moaveni](https://i.dailymail.com/1s/2026/11/15/14/112399467-16278469-_Jill_supported_only_causes_that_made_him_look_good_and_abandone-a-18_1794753737541.jpg)
‘[Jill] supported only causes that made him look good and abandoned them the moment they didn’t,’ writes Moaveni
Jill’s tenure as First Lady was uninspiring as she championed and then quietly dropped projects including the migration initiative and funding for community colleges
Her initiative to provide free community college education failed when it was dropped from a broader spending bill, and while Jill said at the time that she was ‘disappointed,’ one insider told Moaveni: ‘I didn’t get the sense that she was on fire about it.’
‘Over the course of four years, her First Ladyship unfolded as exceedingly narrow, even conservative,’ Moaveni writes.
‘She never pursued a distinct project through which the public could get a sense of her – of her personality, what she cared about and the texture of her beliefs and commitments. She stood steadfastly by her man and squeezed herself into such a narrow, Joe-centric persona that public opinion about the two of them essentially merged.’
But then came Joe Biden’s declining health as he was running for a second term, and a chance for Jill to step in and prevent a looming electoral disaster for the Democratic Party.
In March 2024, some former White House staff started to raise the alarm, and the concerns mounted heading into the now infamous June 27, 2024, debate with Donald Trump.
The East Wing details how Jill was consumed in early June by Hunter’s firearms trial and multiple official functions. At the same time, Joe developed a cold and appeared ‘almost catatonic’ to some big donors. He failed to recognize George Clooney, an incident about which the actor penned a scathing op-ed.
After Biden’s stumbling and shambolic debate performance laid bare his age-related shortcomings, many questioned if Jill should have stepped in.
‘Many senior Democrats blamed her, along with the rest of the family and his close aides, for hiding his condition,’ Moaveni writes.
‘Surely she had known how diminished he was, and if she knew, why had she not persuaded him to step down… as First Lady, she was the most intimate, public face of the campaign persuading Americans that he was fit to serve another term.’
Jill hailed her husband’s debate performance and said he did ‘such a great job.’ But while she was publicly congratulating him, she admits in her recent biography that privately she was deeply concerned about her husband, and was worried he was having a stroke during the debate.
She writes: ‘It felt like we were watching an AI hologram of the man we knew, and the hologram was glitching.’
Jill hailed her husband’s 2024 debate performance and said he did ‘such a great job’
But while she was publicly congratulating him, she admits in her recent biography that privately she was deeply concerned about her husband
But at the time, even as the debate was attracting scathing feedback, she put on a brave face, appearing on the cover of Vogue four days later, wearing a Ralph Lauren tuxedo dress under the headline: ‘We Will Decide Our Future.’
‘The headline alluded to the rollback around women’s rights, but landing four days after the debate, it appeared to convey that Jill was the key figure, along with Joe himself, in deciding the country’s future,’ the book observes.
While the magazine article had been planned months in advance, the decision to go ahead with it despite the awkward timing fueled the narrative of Jill as a ‘Lady Macbeth’ figure, so seduced by her proximity to power that she hid his age-related decline.
Even her political allies have dropped the reference, with Alexandra Pelosi, the daughter of former Democratic House speaker Nancy Pelosi, referring to her as Lady McBiden in 2025.
Jill has said during an appearance on The View last year that such comments were ‘very hurtful’ and said she did not have her husband ‘sequestered in some place’ to hide any cognitive decline.
The Daily Mail has reached out to Joe and Jill Biden for comment.
Joe Biden eventually stepped down as the Democratic candidate to make way for Kamala Harris at the end of July 2024, leading to Trump’s resounding success at the election later that year and leaving Jill Biden with little legacy to speak of.
In her biography, Jill concedes that not adequately addressing concerns about Biden’s health led to more questions, but she defends her time as First Lady and addresses the delicate tightrope she had to walk.
‘Being First Lady could feel like a catch-22,’ she writes. ‘You were encouraged to use your platform to do good, but not to be too aggressive in pursuing policy goals, lest you be seen as overreaching. If you knew too little about what you were talking about, then you were an embarrassment. If you knew too much, you were trying to rule the world.’
