Jill Biden Says She, President Settle Disputes by 'Fext'

That is, they fight via text
By Newser Editors and Wire Services
Posted May 31, 2022 1:40 PM CDT
Jill Biden Explains How She and Joe Settle Arguments
First lady Jill Biden visits with Slovak and Ukrainian mothers and their children as the families participate in a Mother's Day activity in Kosice, Slovakia, May 8, 2022.   (Jill Biden says she and the president don't hash out disagreements in front of other people, but argue instead by text. “Fexting” is what they call it. The first lady has revealed that and more in a new interview in the June-July issue of Harper's Bazaar. AP Photo/Susan Walsh, Pool, File)

When President Biden and first lady Jill Biden disagree, they don't hash it out in front of the Secret Service and other people. Instead, she says, they fight by text—or “fexting” as they call it. After she recently texted the President in a fit of pique, he told her, “’You realize that’s going to go down in history. There will be a record of that,’” she said. Presidential communications are preserved for the historical record. She told her interviewer, “I won’t tell you what I called him that time.” Jill Biden also told Harper's Bazaar magazine in an interview that her divorce from her first husband taught her to be independent and that she has drilled that lesson into her daughter and granddaughters.

Jill Biden was 18 when she married her first husband. But by her mid-20s, she was divorced, alone, and on her own for the first time in her life, per the AP. The breakup dealt her an emotional blow as she had idolized her parents' union and thought she'd have a marriage as long-lasting as theirs. She finished college and became a teacher. “I knew I would never, ever put myself in that position again, where I didn’t feel like I had the finances to be on my own, that I had to get the money through a divorce settlement,” she said. It's a lesson she drummed into her daughter and granddaughters. “You have to be able to stand on your own two feet,” she said.

Jill Biden met then-Sen. Joe Biden in 1975, and they were married two years later. She kept teaching throughout his rise in national politics, eventually becoming the first first lady to hold a paying job outside the White House. She fits her responsibilities as first lady around her twice-a-week teaching schedule at Northern Virginia Community College. The first lady appears on the cover of Harper’s June-July issue, available on newsstands June 7. The magazine said it’s the first time in its 155-year history that a US first lady has been so prominently featured. (More Jill Biden stories.)

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