2024-07-13 03:07:45
The White House’s ‘Door Knob Power’ That the World Is Watching
‘Woman’ with painful family history of husband… For the first time ever, she commutes to work and maintains her own life
Melania Trump, the ‘reclusive’ who rejected the White House… A quiet but glamorous fashion trend
Michelle, a ‘political asset’ with a brilliant speech… Childhood obesity eradication movement popular nationwide
“I love you, Jilly. I can’t tell you how grateful I am to have you by my side on the journey ahead of us.”
This is what US President Joe Biden (82) posted on Twitter on January 20, 2021, ahead of his inauguration. Just before ascending to the highest position he had dreamed of his entire life, the one person President Biden looked for was his wife, Jilli.
President Biden is a loving husband. He has shown infinite trust in Mrs. Jill Biden (73) and has not hidden the fact that she is necessary for his presidency. This is also the reason why more attention was focused on Mrs. Jill than on President Biden after President Biden suffered a crushing defeat in the TV debate with former President Donald Trump on the 27th of last month (local time). The New York Times (NYT) and others reported that “whether the president completes the election depends on Mrs. Jill’s intentions.”
In any country, the first lady is a shared destiny with the supreme ruler. She is the closest aide and shares political ups and downs. In particular, the first lady of the United States, who is called the president of the world, is in an important position where every move draws attention.
As the US presidential race has become increasingly chaotic, three current and former first ladies are in the spotlight together.
Jill Biden, who holds the key to the direction of the presidential election, Melania Trump, who is likely to become the first lady again, and Michelle Obama, who has already lived in the White House for eight years but has recently been mentioned as a strong presidential candidate. We compared the three first ladies of the United States, who have completely different colors from supporting the president to social activities and fashion.
● ‘Working First Lady’ Mrs. Jill
President Biden and his wife are one of the most loving couples in American politics. Looking back on their lives, it is understandable why President Biden relies so heavily on Mrs. Jill.
The two met in 1975 through the arrangement of President Biden’s older brother Frank. The fact that she chose President Biden, who was raising his two seriously injured sons alone after his wife’s death, shows Mrs. Jill’s strong personality. President Biden lost his ex-wife Neilia and daughter Naomi in a car accident in 1972. At the time, he commuted four hours (about 400 km) every day between Washington and his Delaware home to take care of his sons Beau and Hunter, who were injured in the accident.
Mrs. Jill, who had been married once but had no children, took it upon herself to be the mother of her two sons. She had been devoted to taking care of Beau and Hunter, who were in kindergarten, even before she got married, and spent evenings with them in place of the busy Biden. She also helped the children keep in touch with their deceased biological mother’s family.
In his autobiography, “Joe Biden: Promises to Keep: My Life, Beliefs, and Politics,” President Biden recalled that in 1977, Beau (then 7 years old) and Hunter (then 6 years old) insisted, “We (Bo and Hunter) should marry Jill.” Even as adults, the two sons still have a special relationship with Jill, calling her “Mom.”
Even after becoming the First Lady, she continues to live the life of a ‘working mom’, which shows her strong personality. She is the first ‘two-job First Lady’ in the history of the US Constitution to commute to and from the White House. She has been teaching for over 30 years and is currently working as a professor at Northern Virginia Community College, teaching English composition to low-income families.
According to the Washington Post (WP), Mrs. Jill rarely talks about politics to her students and is strict. When Vice President Biden was in office, one student even thought, “Why is the English writing professor sitting next to First Lady Michelle Obama?” Mrs. Jill is very proud of her career, to the point where she says on her White House homepage, “Teaching is not something I do, it’s showing who I am.”
Mrs. Jill’s fashion is characterized by its ‘non-specificity’. She usually prefers solid-colored two-pieces or one-piece dresses without any special messages. She sometimes wears one-piece dresses or dresses that she has worn once several times at official events. Recently, Mrs. Jill showed off an unusual fashion with a message. The day after the TV debate, she wore a one-piece dress with the phrase ‘Vote’ written on it during a campaign rally in Raleigh, North Carolina. It is interpreted as her refusing to accept pressure to resign and expressing her will to complete the presidential election.
There are also criticisms that Ms. Jill is assertive and overly protective of her family. Ms. Jill is known to have been cold to President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, who competed for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2020, for a while.
There is also an opinion that President Biden, who has recently been under pressure to resign, is unable to properly read public opinion and continues to emphasize finishing the race because of Mrs. Jill’s “will to finish the race.” NBC recently reported, citing a White House source, that “the White House is divided as the differences of opinion between aides and family members (on the request for the presidential candidate to step down) are becoming extreme.”
● Melania Trump in ‘Rapunzel in the Tower’
Former President Trump’s wife, Melania Trump (54), was the most ‘reclusive’ first lady in US history. After former President Trump took office in January 2017, the first lady chose to remain in her Trump Tower residence in New York and not move into the White House, an unprecedented choice. She explained that it was “to avoid transferring her son Barron, who is attending a private school,” but it was unprecedented for a first lady to refuse to move into the White House.
At that time, Mrs. Melania’s New York seclusion lasted for nearly five months. Barron was escorted to and from school by Secret Service agents, and he was extremely reluctant to go out. WP reported that “even veteran paparazzi don’t know where he is.”
Meanwhile, the role of First Lady was taken by former President Trump’s daughter Ivanka. Ivanka is the eldest daughter of former President Trump’s first wife and is only eleven years younger than Melania. It was at this time that Melania, who was losing her presence, was given the nickname “Rapunzel in the Tower.” The ridiculous hashtag “#FreeMelania” was trending on social media.
First Lady Melania is an immigrant from Yugoslavia (now Slovenia). She moved to Western Europe in 1992 to pursue modeling and moved to New York in 1996. She met her husband, who is 24 years her senior, at a party in 1998. At the time, former President Trump was a womanizing real estate developer who had just divorced his second wife. The two had a series of breakups and reconciliations before marrying in 2005, and First Lady Melania acquired American citizenship the following year. They have a son, Barron, who was born in 2006.
First Lady Melania Trump also barely made an appearance during the 2016 presidential election. The general opinion is that she chose a ‘low-key’ approach because her nude pictorial for a fashion magazine in 2000 was used as a material for attacks. She has also been embarrassed at rare events. At the Republican National Convention in July 2016, when former President Trump was officially nominated as the presidential candidate, she gave a speech in support of the party, but was criticized for plagiarizing a speech written by First Lady Michelle Obama eight years ago.
Even after entering the White House, she was often compared to her predecessor, Michelle. Michelle gave 74 speeches in her first year as president, while Melania gave only 8 speeches during the same period. Michelle’s campaign to combat childhood obesity was popular across the country, but Melania’s campaign to prevent cyberbullying, which she launched after 16 months, was ridiculed. Many responded, “Trump is the perpetrator who makes baseless accusations against his opponents on social media.”
The public’s attention was focused on Melania’s fashion. As a former model, the expensive designer products she chose were always a hot topic. Sometimes, she was criticized for her inappropriate fashion. A representative example is when she visited a hurricane disaster site wearing high heels in August 2017. The following year, she was criticized for visiting a detention center for illegal immigrant children wearing a coat that said “I really don’t care.”
Even ahead of this presidential election, Mrs. Melania has been keeping a quiet pace. She has not accompanied her husband on a campaign trail since he declared his candidacy in November of last year. She did not even show up at the TV debate held in Atlanta, Georgia last month.
However, it is not that Melania does not intervene at all in her husband’s politics. In particular, it is said that she had a decisive influence on the selection of former Indiana Governor Mike Pence as vice presidential candidate in 2016. Former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, who is close to the Trumps, said, “Contrary to popular perception, she is not a wallflower,” and “Trump often consults with high-ranking White House officials.”
● ‘My husband’s greatest political asset’, Mrs. Michelle
Former President Barack Obama’s wife, Michelle (60), placed importance on the role of a homemaker and mother. It is a well-known story that when former President Obama announced his intention to run for president, he made quitting smoking a condition. Former President Obama later declared that he had successfully quit smoking, saying, “I quit because I was afraid of Michelle.”
It is said that Michelle strongly discouraged former President Obama from challenging Bobby Rush, then a four-term congressman from Chicago and Illinois, in 2000. In his book “Amateur,” political commentator Edward Klein said, “Ultimately, Obama did not listen to Michelle’s warnings,” and “He left his family financially unstable and dashed Michelle’s hopes for a stable future.” It is also known that Michelle filed for divorce.
After entering the White House, Mrs. Michelle took special care of her two daughters’ healthy diet. She asked the White House kitchen to prepare organic food for their diet. In particular, she created a vegetable garden on the South Lawn, the southern lawn of the White House, and started tending it herself in March 2009.
The interest in healthy eating led to public activity. The year after she started her garden, she started the Let’s Move campaign to combat childhood obesity. The campaign, which promoted eating five types of vegetables and jumping five times, greatly increased Americans’ interest in healthy living.
However, she did not stay in the role of ‘hostess’. She had the power to captivate the audience with her excellent speaking skills, just like her husband. She often gave speeches as a relief pitcher for former President Obama, and was evaluated as her husband’s greatest political asset.
The speech made by Michelle Obama at the Democratic National Convention on September 4, 2012, during the re-election campaign, is still remembered as a famous speech. Michelle Obama emphasized, “Barack knows the ‘American Dream’ because he lived it. No matter who we are, where we come from, what we look like, or who we love, he wants everyone in this country to have the same opportunity.” At the time, CNN praised it as “a game-winning grand slam in the bottom of the ninth.”
The speech supporting former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who ran for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2016, also received great acclaim. First Lady Michelle, the first black first lady of the United States, said at the time, “I wake up every morning in a house built by black slaves (the White House) and see my two daughters running around the lawn with their dogs,” and “If it’s Hillary, my daughter and our children can naturally accept the birth of history as the first female president of the United States.” At the time, the Washington Post praised her, saying, “It will be hard to come up with a speech that surpasses this in the remaining period.”
With her career as a lawyer, her excellent speaking skills, and her active social activities, Michelle is also mentioned as a potential Democratic presidential candidate. A recent Reuters-Ipsos poll reported that if Michelle runs in the November election, she would win with 50% of the votes, beating former President Trump (39%). However, Michelle has stated that she is “not interested in politics.”
During her time as First Lady, Michelle often wore tight-fitting one-piece dresses that matched her height of 180cm. She also conveyed messages. The yellow dress by gay American designer Narciso Rodriguez that she wore to former President Obama’s State of the Union address in January 2016 particularly garnered attention. It is analyzed that she expressed her support for the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to legalize same-sex marriage through fashion.
Reporter Choi Ji-seon [email protected]
Reporter Lee Ji-yoon [email protected]
Reporter Lee Ki-wook [email protected]
2024-07-13 03:07:45