President Joe Biden and First Lady Jill Biden have adopted their own strategy for resolving disputes, and they refer to it as “fexting.”
The goal, according to the Biden’s, is to avoid fighting where others can hear them hashing things out. And now that they are both surrounded by Secret Service agents and other officials almost constantly, the simplest way to do that is via text message.
“When Joe Biden was vice president, the couple decided to settle disagreements by text to avoid fighting in the presence of their Secret Service agents — and dubbed it fexting,” The Associated Press reported, adding, “After she recently texted him 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.'”
First Lady Jill Biden made that revelation — among others — during an interview for an upcoming cover story in Harper’s Bazaar, which will hit newsstands nationwide on June 7.
In addition to revealing their “fexting” habit, Biden told the publication that one of her teenage granddaughters could soon be living in the White House, albeit for a short time. The granddaughter in question, Biden said, had secured an internship in Washington, D.C., for the summer and asked for permission to stay with her grandparents at the executive mansion.
Biden also spoke about her divorce and how helpless it had made her feel to be on her own and ill-equipped after marrying at 18 and divorcing in her mid-twenties, still not finished with her own education.
“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,” Biden explained. “I drummed that into (my daughter), Ashley, ‘Be independent, be independent.’ And my granddaughters. You have to be able to stand on your own two feet.”
It wasn’t until two years later that she met Biden.
Harper’s Bazaar said that the Dr. Jill Biden cover spread will mark the first time in the publication’s 155-year run “that a U.S. first lady has been so prominently featured.”