In the eyes of millions of Americans, President Joe Biden is viewed as exhibiting a decline in his cognitive capabilities and many wonder if he is actually the person who is in charge and in control of his own administration and White House.
That leads to the obvious question: If not Joe, then who is in charge? And it increasingly appears that the answer to that query is his wife, first lady Jill Biden, who reportedly exerts an outsized influence over her husband's administration, according to the Western Journal.
Yet, that development is simply unacceptable to millions of Americans, given that not a single person voted for the part-time community college English professor to be the most powerful political leader in the entire world.
Bloomberg News' Nancy Cook recently wrote about how the American people can "Expect to see a lot more of first lady Jill Biden in 2024," given that she will likely play a leading role in President Biden's probable re-election campaign.
That is because "within the White House she is understood to be the president’s closest and most protective confidante," and according to a former top aide to the first lady, Michael LaRosa, "she is his gut check on everything."
Cook asserted that it would almost certainly be Jill who makes the final decision on whether Joe runs for a second term. Cook wrote, "She supports a bid, according to people familiar with the matter, because she cares about how her husband is perceived and believes he’s better at the job than his 42 percent average approval rating indicates most Americans think."
She is not involved in "policy minutiae," but does hold vengeful grudges, and even admitted in her own 2019 memoir, "I remember every slight committed against the people I love" -- whether those slights were committed by allies or rivals.
The first lady has already played an influential role in some of the president's appointments and nominations, has berated his staff for not handling or deploying him in ways that she approves, and is now expected to serve as his top "adviser and surrogate" in a presumptive 2024 campaign and second term in the White House.
Fox News columnist Liz Peek surmised recently that first lady Jill Biden could fill the "power vacuum" left by the departure of White House Chief of Staff Ron Klain and assert even more control and influence over the administration than she already reportedly does as "the president’s closest confidant" and fiercest defender.
That includes the aforementioned weighing in on the president's personnel choices, but also his schedule, how he is presented to the public, and how he interacts with the media -- even, on multiple occasions, physically inserting herself and guiding him away from reporters with "pesky" questions that the Bidens would prefer to not answer.
Given President Biden's increasingly apparent mental decline, Peek referenced the now-known fact that former first lady Edith Wilson was, for all intents and purposes, the unelected acting president of the United States for about a year and a half after then-President Woodrow Wilson suffered a debilitating stroke in 1919 that left him paralyzed and incapable of performing his duties -- a grim reality that was kept completely hidden from everyone by the first lady until after Wilson's term expired in 1921.
It should be noted that this view of first lady Jill Biden being the one in actual control of President Biden's White House and administration is not entirely new, but rather has been floated since the 2020 campaign, and even NBC News reported in October 2022 about her "wielding unparalleled influence" over the White House in terms of policy and personnel and many other things.
Again, this is not what the American people signed up for when Joe Biden was selected to serve as president, which was perhaps best summed up by former Rep. Doug Collins (R-GA) in a recent interview with Fox News.
"This has really gotten concerning because nobody, frankly, in all fairness to the first lady, nobody elected her to answer questions for the president on issues that the press may have questioned," the former congressman accurately noted.
