Social media erupted after First Lady Jill Biden presented at what may be one of President Biden’s final Cabinet meetings in the White House.
Biden convened his Cabinet on Friday for the first time since Oct. 2, 2023 – this time with the first lady joining him to speak about the White House Initiative on Women’s Health Research.
The president explained Jill Biden’s presence there, saying, “Here and across previous administrations, first ladies have attended these meetings for specific reasons. This is the first time Jill has joined us, and it goes to show how important the issue is, which she is about to speak to.”
He concluded by handing off to his wife, saying, “It’s all yours, kid.”
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The New York Post reported that Jill Biden, seated at the head of the Cabinet Room’s board table, “read from a binder about maternal health initiatives for four-and-a-half minutes after her husband spoke for just two minutes off the top of the meeting.”
The president traditionally sits at the center of the table with Cabinet members seated in order of the founding of their departments. The last sitting first lady to attend her husband’s Cabinet meeting appears to be Hillary Clinton.
The amount of influence the first lady has over Joe Biden, and therefore his administration, has been a frequent source of controversy, and numerous commentators took to social media to criticize her presence at the meeting.
The New York Post said that Jill Biden is “considered by insiders to be the most influential first lady since Edith Wilson, who tightly controlled access to her husband, President Woodrow Wilson, after he suffered a debilitating stroke in October 1919.”
Digital strategist Greg Price referenced this comparison, saying, “She’s literally Edith Wilson except right out in the open in a 24/7 news cycle and nobody in the media cares.”
“Wow. A visibly exhausted Joe Biden just held a full Cabinet meeting for the first time in 11 months and immediately turned the mic over to his wife, Jill,” previous adviser to former President Donald Trump Steve Cortes said. He went on to ask, “Who is running the country?”
“Jill Biden is the head of the table at the cabinet meeting. No one voted for her to be there… this must be part of her deal to have Joe drop out of the race,” podcaster Tim Young speculated. “She has no reason to be there.”
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The co-founder of The Federalist, Sean Davis, sarcastically quipped, “I wasn’t aware that our constitutional system of government bestowed any power whatsoever to the unelected wife of the figurehead president.”
“It’s insane that the world’s #1 nuclear superpower just sort of stumbled its way into a power vacuum,” The Hill columnist T. Becket Adams mused. “It’s even more insane that the vacuum has been filled by the former ruler’s wife, who holds no legal governing authority.”
“Is this real?” Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., asked. “Is this who’s running the country”?
“Before President Biden updated his cabinet and the country on the continued achievements of the most successful administration in modern history, he asked the First Lady to join for the top of the meeting to showcase groundbreaking work they are leading to fundamentally change how we fund and approach women’s health research,” White House deputy press secretary Andrew Bates told Fox News Digital.
“If the only response these critics have are conspiracy theories that devalue historic progress researching women’s health – including terrible diseases – then that says a lot about why more and more American women feel that the right couldn’t care less about them, including as it pushes radical abortion bans,” he added, while also making a dig about Hawley running out of the Capitol on Jan. 6.
Fox News’ Greg Norman contributed to this report.
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