Why Republican and Democratic First Ladies Get Treated Differently

Jill Biden still hasn’t forgotten when Kamala Harris essentially accused Joe Biden of being a segregationist.

Melania Trump might not move back to Washington full time if Donald Trump wins the White House in November.

And Hillary Clinton’s advisers say she never could have gotten away with how Laura Bush handled the Iraq War.

These are just some of the insights Katie Rogers has gleaned after writing a new book on the transformation of the modern first lady.

The role is a largely ceremonial one for the public, but behind the scenes, the first lady is often one of the most influential — and therefore one of the most powerful people — in any White House.

Rogers, a reporter for the New York Times, sat down with me for this week’s episode of the Playbook Deep Dive podcast where we covered everything from the first lady’s role in staffing, campaigning and policy decisions to serving as the president’s enforcer.

“She mirrors her husband’s grievances and channels them in her own way,” Rogers said of Melania Trump.

We also discussed the time Rogers’ editors sent her to Arkansas to report a story about the Bidens that she didn’t want to cover — and how it ended up forcing Jill and Joe to confront an uncomfortable truth about their family.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity, with help from Deep Dive Senior Producer Alex Keeney.

Let's talk about Jill Biden in office and what we've now learned about her in these three-plus years. There's a strong element of “Jill the enforcer” in Biden world. What are your favorite examples? Maybe we can start with Kamala Harris? 

It's so baked into her. I could go back to the ‘80s, but we could start with Kamala Harris. So Harris, during one of the Democratic primary debates, she basically calls him a segregationist. It becomes a moment in which Harris receives a bump in the polls. It's very temporary. And in exchange for that slight bump, she earns a very visceral reaction from Jill Biden, who essentially says, “Go fuck yourself.”

Do you say that on here?

We can. I encourage you because then you get a very classy “explicit” rating on Apple. 

Oh that's cool. On the first lady's episode. Look at that.

So Jill Biden is very angry about this. There was one moment in 2022 where Jill Biden goes to a fundraiser in San Francisco, which is Kamala Harris' home turf, and is hearing from donors about how much they hope Kamala Harris is serving the Bidens and how proud they are of her — “We just hope she represents us well” meaning San Francisco.

And Jill Biden, who is a very classically trained fundraising political spouse, doesn't say anything, takes a beat to the point where it's awkward and says, “But what about Ketanji?” steering the conversation away from a very fulsome compliment of the vice president toward her husband's pick for the Supreme Court, Ketanji Brown Jackson.

And if you ask people who know her, that surprises nobody. One person said, “You know, she's Italian. It's about loyalty.” [That] is exactly how they explain that whole thing to me.

A couple other examples: a prime one is Ron Klain, who was Biden's first chief of staff and a longtime fixture of Biden world. When he decamped to work on Hillary Clinton's campaign, that was seen as an ultimate disloyal move. And several people actually told me that it took a lot of diplomacy to get Jill to the point that she was supportive of [Klain’s hiring]. I don't think, from my reporting, that she would ultimately have the power to stop someone like Klain coming on, but I also think she wouldn't do that, because at points throughout their history together — and Harris is actually an example — she understands that what these people can help her husband win. That's a key thing to understand about her and Biden, is how competitive they are.

Your narrative about Jill Biden’s somewhat fraught relationship with Kamala Harris does make you wonder how much lingering friction there is, and if it contributes to Harris' difficulties in the Biden White House, and if that might be preventing her from being a full partner. 

The one thing I would just say to that is Joe Biden's inner circle is as much Jill's domain as it is his. She's really a gatekeeper for the people who are closest to him, even though she's not in the West Wing. She's not stationed there holding open the door to the Oval. But she definitely knows everything that's going on. She has several aides who have been with the Bidens for years, if not decades. They understand how she wants things to be run. They understand that loyalty is super, super paramount. And if it's violated, it's really hard to get that back with both Bidens, especially Jill.

Speaking of gatekeeping and Jill’s staff, there's a character who you flesh out that I think our listeners would find interesting, and that’s Anthony Bernal, who you quote Jill as saying she is in a “work marriage” with. Tell us a little bit about what it's like inside the East Wing and what role Anthony has.

Anthony first came to the Bidens on the 2008 campaign as part of Jill Biden’s staff and quickly established himself as an ear for her when the Biden camp sort of struggled against the Obama machine.

So starting there, traveling forward to 2015, when Beau Biden dies of brain cancer, part of that relationship with Anthony Bernal and the Bidens is absolutely solidified because of how he was able to keep things quiet, keep their privacy intact. He's incredibly loyal. Somebody told me that he would walk in front of a speeding train for her. And all of that manifests into an East Wing that has actually no chief of staff. Jill Biden's chief of staff left like two years ago, and ever since then, it's been a chief of staff-less East Wing, which is very unusual.

Anthony Bernal is the most powerful person in that East Wing by far because he has dominion over everything that happens in it, from trips and scheduling, to speeches and messaging. This is a person whose background is in scheduling and advance. So he's got control over all sorts of different levers that the first lady has; but also by extension, he's in senior calls every day. He helped plan the president's trip to Ukraine because the first lady had gone there first.

President Biden went to Brownsville last week to the border. Jill Biden made that trip during the campaign, and that was something that had already been scouted and blueprinted by Bernal. He has sort of made blueprints for how these trips go, how the president looks when we see him — not just the first lady. So he's a very interesting figure in the sense that he has a lot of control in the East Wing, certainly, and a lot of control in the West Wing. And the other beat to that is he is known to sort of be very overbearing. He can be aggressive and direct with aides, specifically less experienced ones, and that has at times been a source of a lot of tension in the White House.

Another really fascinating story in this book is the very sensitive reporting around Hunter Biden and Lunden Roberts' child, Navy Joan Roberts. This was a blockbuster story and I wonder if you could just tell us how it came about, whether you were apprehensive at all about  digging into this, and the fallout from it? 

So I really didn't want to do it.

Who made you do it?

People way above my paygrade, as we like to say. People in New York and in the highest ranks of Washington assigned it.

You were just following orders?

Well, I was really trying not to for a while and we had several meetings about it. I have a daughter and the way I perceived the story was that they wanted me to write about a little girl whose family didn't want her, and journalistically I couldn't wrap my head around that assignment. I just kept saying “no,” and they kept sort of sitting me down. And eventually I had a conversation with our [New York Times] bureau chief, a woman named Elisabeth Bumiller, who brought me to the bureau. And I trust her a lot because this is the kind of story that, to me, if I do this badly, it's my last one.

I don't want to write a story that I can't keep control of, you know? So she kind of sat me down and said, “You can do this story because it's about two families. One of them is powerful, and one of them is not powerful. And this is a story about what it means to be a Biden.”

That gave me the grounding and the journalistic curiosity that I needed to pursue it, because I didn't want to write about a child support dispute and a little girl. So I went down to Arkansas and made contact with the family and learned more about the little girl. And the more I learned, the more I realized how loved she was and innocent she was. She was literally above this toxic, horrible, politicized mess. So when I sat down to write the story, I'm proudest of the lede where I kind of made her the top. You see a little blond girl in the story with sun in her hair, riding four-wheelers and playing with her cousins, and then it backs into the sort of ugliness that adults in her life are engaged in.

It ended up being an important story because it led to the president and the first lady acknowledging a granddaughter that they hadn't ever acknowledged publicly before. Now they say they have seven grandkids and not six. And Hunter Biden is participating in — or upholding — his end of the agreement. I'm proud of how the story turned out. At some point it becomes a private matter again. That's kind of how I had to get my head around it.

It was an excellent story and you dealt with it with an incredible amount of sensitivity. And it did something rare in political journalism, which is you held up a mirror to the powerful players in the saga and forced them to confront how they were dealing with this, and they couldn't really defend it.

They went to People magazine and with a bit of an assist from Maureen Dowd, who wrote a column about it, you completely changed the way the Biden family talks publicly about their granddaughter. 

Maureen does deserve credit. She was able to speak directly to [Biden]. And, from my reporting, I know he read that. I think that having the journalistic base is super important before a column like that, but she was able to sort of speak directly to the president on that one.

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A good chunk of the book is about the history of first ladies and the changes in that role. Who was the most surprising to you? Who did you learn something new and interesting about that you didn't expect? 

Revisiting Laura Bush was actually the most interesting for me because I grew up at a time where the older brothers of my friends were literally going to war. That started happening when I was in high school.

She launched the National Book Festival three days before 9/11 happened. The National Book Festival was going to be her thing. That was it. You know, “I'm a librarian. I'm going to talk about literacy. I'm going to support No Child Left Behind,” and that's pretty much it. And then she becomes a wartime first lady overnight and has to assume the president's regular radio address, talking about the war and talking about the plight of Afghan women and girls. And Hillary Clinton's advisers told me, “There's no way on God's green earth that she could have done that” — she was seen as divisive and ambitious, and parts of the country revolted against that.

Is it easier for Republican first ladies to have a role like that? For example, one of the interesting things in reading the book is the difference between the way that Barbara Bush and Hillary Clinton were treated.

I suppose Republican women have had it easier, but really they haven't in their own way, because the knee-jerk reaction to them is they're housewives and help maids.

If you know anything about Barbara Bush, her primary role was to be a wife and a mother, but she was an adviser and a confidante and had an immense influence within her family and in that White House. People knew not to cross her. She was known to have very sharp political instincts and an even sharper sense of humor. She was a powerful woman.

On the other end of the spectrum, Hillary Clinton was expected to walk this very fine line of being a wife and a supporter but not disparaging women by talking about her own career. And when Hillary Clinton was introducing herself to the country, she kind of made a few missteps, like when she said, “I'm not going to stay at home and bake cookies. I want to work.” The reaction to her was a lot sharper in another way, but it all goes back to this idea that women are expected to be one thing or the other, and they must not emerge from those boxes. Republicans and Democrats both deal with different versions of that same gendered expectation.

One thing that strikes me is that the dominant narrative about these first ladies is often based on the criticism from their political opponents, whereas the first lady's own party tends to be quiet and just sort of respects who they are.

Or completely ignores them. It was interesting about Melania — remember when everybody thought she was a secret resistance figure/liberal?

That's what I want to talk to you about.  Because that was definitely the thread that runs through your material on her and you answer this question. What are your conclusions about Melania? 

She's not a secret resistance figure. But there was this time for maybe the first year — and maybe that's because she wasn't actually in Washington yet — she was still getting her son ready to move down and working out some marriage-related agreements [with Donald Trump].

Regarding the reporting about Melania and Donald negotiating the legal agreement between them early in the Trump presidency, what did you discover about that? 

So Mary Jordan, she's a journalist for the Washington Post, first reported this in her book on Melania Trump, which is that part of the delay in Melania Trump coming to Washington was she was reorganizing her pre- and post-nuptial agreements with Donald Trump, which her office denied at the time.

I did some reporting for my book and years had passed and people had left the Trump administration and were willing to speak on the record about what they knew and what they had seen. Stephanie Grisham, who is Melania Trump's former communications director, former White House press secretary, she's written a tell-all about her time. She talked to me separately for this and said much of [Melania’s] time was indeed focused on post-nuptial agreements and money she had in the bank.

Melania Trump's office didn't outright deny this. They just said to me, “She's a businesswoman and has her own business interests to uphold.” And that was in the context of me asking about “Did she spend a lot of time in the White House meeting with her lawyers?” Yes. She did.

So I think there was just a lot of expectation or maybe even hope among liberals, there was a time where people were almost liking her. It felt like to me, and this is all anecdotal, but there's polling that shows that she was pretty popular at one point, because ...

... She was a secret member of the Resistance. 

Yeah. There was this expectation that the reason she was slapping Trump’s hand away in public, or not moving down [to Washington], was because she had opposition to what he believed. The reality of it is that, after reporting on this, she mirrors her husband's grievances and channels them in her own way and is, in most cases, not a mediating force for him at all. In fact, the opposite is often true, where if her husband is being attacked, she encourages him to fight back.

Charlottesville she got a lot of credit for in the aftermath. She said, “Let the violence stop,” when her husband said, “Both sides have good people.” But that is really an outlier.

She is someone who's much more likely to channel her husband's beliefs. And that also is rooted in his birtherism stuff with President Obama. She was on The View, talking about how Obama needed to show off his birth certificate because people wanted to know.

And on January 6th, she was not exactly a moderating influence on him, was she? 

I don't think she was any sort of influence. Toward the end of her time there, she was in the residence almost all the time. And when she wasn't, she was summoning a photographer to take photos of the aesthetic changes she had made to the White House, which are culturally relevant. I don't mean to disparage a first lady's interest in improving the White House complex, but during an unfolding of such violence — it was stunning — as things unfolded that day, she was asked by Grisham whether she wanted to say anything to encourage an end to the violence. And she just flat out said “no.” She was busy having photographs of a rug taken that day. So that's what she was up to while Trump was in the dining room off the Oval watching the proceedings.

What's your sense of her complete lack of a public role in the Trump campaign? And if you had to predict, what do you think her role will be this year? 

You know that it's terrible to predict things, but I'm going to go ahead and do it.

Knowing what I know and what my reporting on Melania Trump shows, she likes being first lady. But my reporting does not show that she enjoys campaigning. My reporting does not show that she enjoys defending her husband, as she has been called to do numerous times. And my reporting doesn't show that she has an interest in returning to Washington full time.

So, I guess taken together, if Trump wins, we could expect a first lady who embraces the role, but possibly, because she was such a norm-breaking figure, takes her time coming to Washington, goes back and forth — that seems possible to me.

People who know her say that she would absolutely do it over again, but they're less clear on the details of what that would look like. And in terms of being a campaigner, she's somebody who has no interest in doing that. I know Trump has said that she will be out there in the near future, but I don't know. I think I would be surprised to see her out anytime soon on the trail.

Jill Biden had been around Washington for a long time and was a little bit more integrated into the Washington community than Melania or Michelle Obama. But right away, Jill Biden had her own challenges. 

I think starting her relationship with Joe Biden is maybe the way to look at that in terms of how much he adores her. He just is obsessed with his wife. And I think they have a real love story.

I hate to interrupt you but we just have to talk about this nugget from the book that went viral. You know what I'm going to ask, right?

Yeah. I had put this line in the book. It's like no more than a paragraph about Joe Biden's obsession with his wife, which is real.

He has told aides that the secret to a good marriage is good sex. And people picked that up and ran with it all over the internet. But another thing that's interesting is people I didn't talk to for the book who have worked for the Bidens reached out to me. And one person told me he's been saying this since he was VP. Like, Biden just says this to people. It's a point of advice he gives to young-uns.

Your reporting took you into very sensitive places. 

It did. That interlude is all to set up this idea that he really loves his wife, and it can sometimes veer into over-protectiveness.

Can you tell us the story of how she pressed on Joe Biden and his campaign to carve out her role as a teacher, and how historically unique that was after he was elected?

He doesn't like her to be gone for more than a few days at a time. He's always happier when she's there. As his aides will attest, he's much more demanding, frustrated, quick to anger when she's away. And the context of these conversations about whether she would teach or not is him saying “baby” like, literally “baby” — she does not like that nickname — saying, “We don't know how you're going to do this, if it's going to be too much, how are you going to take a salary?”

Some of the concerns were about whether she would violate the emoluments clause working for a state-funded school after four years of Trump sort of breaking the rules with that specific clause.

If you know anything about the Biden circle, they obsess over everything and sometimes the little things. So she had to sort of nod along and not react in this meeting. But then behind the scenes she works with one of her senior aides to clear a path with the school. She says, “I'm going to teach. I'm going to sign up for Zoom teaching.”

And then she kind of springs it on Biden and everybody during the transition when they're preparing for an interview for Stephen Colbert. Basically, one of the prep questions is, “Are you going to teach?”

And she's like, “Yep.”

And Biden interjects and says, “Yeah, but only a few hours, right?”

And she says, “No, 15 credits. Full course load.”

“I didn't know this.”

“I told you this.”

And then it was settled. It was just … she set it up, but he didn't know.

What was so amazing about that story is that they're doing this in front of staff, and Biden is very surprised by her decision, which is a pretty important decision. 

It's been recounted to me as kind of an awkward moment.

Mommy and daddy are fighting, right? 

Yeah. And you're getting this look into a marriage that everybody understands is solid. But these two have been around a long time. They know not to have conversations like this around anyone. The fact that this played out in the open was interesting; and it's interesting strategy on the first lady's part for her to say, “Not only am I going to do this on a call with my husband, but it's so everyone who is closest to us knows that this is what I'm doing, and I'm going to say this on television if it gets asked.”

How did writing this book while you were covering the White House and raising a newborn daughter influence your views of these women? 

It's funny because I have thought about this fleetingly. Nobody's ever really asked me about it. I guess maybe I thought it's obvious, but becoming a mom in this business, it changes your view on a lot of stuff. I had a 5-month-old when I decided to write a book about first ladies, so it changed how I encountered them in my reporting and my research; and I understood their boundaries in a different way, in a way that I could not have possibly understood before.

Michelle Obama is maybe the prime example of this, where she stepped back from a high-powered career to make sure her husband had the best shot he could at winning the presidency. But more than that, she didn't really put a policy plan in place until her two daughters were well-adjusted in Washington, and she knew herself well enough to set those boundaries and set those expectations right from the beginning. She had given up so much of her identity already, and just the fact that she preserved that piece of it for her family, I think there were people at the time who had opinions over whether or not she should have given up her job, or whether or not she should have launched “Let's Move” in the first six months or been more of an activist or policymaking first lady.

The fact that she stuck to her boundaries in service of her daughters — I looked at that a lot differently than I would have before.

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