Is Jill Biden Really Claire Underwood?

A Most Democrat Netflix Series

I’ve watched House of Cards twice in its entirety and I’ve seen certain episodes four or five times. I do not know why I am so mesmerized by this series (on Netflix) considering there are almost no likeable characters in the whole show. I may allow for an exception for Freddy Hayes, a peripheral character you might not remember. He runs Freddy’s BBQ Joint.

Bill Clinton once said that House of Cards was quite believable except for the fact that the lead character, Frank Underwood, was able to pass an education bill in under six months. The plot line of House of Cards always reminded me of the Clinton administration. Frank Underwood, who starts out in the series as Senator and then winds up President, is married to Claire Underwood, a beautiful and ambitious woman who is involved on some do-goodery in the D.C. elite circles but has an eye for politics. Here and there even in the first season, the two of them let slip what’s really going on.

They are both politically ambitious and they forged an interesting plan. The two of them would push Frank up the ladder of political power first, so he could reach back and lend a helping hand to Claire, who had ever intention of climbing that same ladder. Claire may even be more ambitious than her husband.

What gets exposed more slowly is that Frank and Claire are each playing the same game but by entirely different rules. Despite calculated adulteries, Frank actually loves Claire. Frank is a somewhat calculatingly gregarious kind of guy; he has the same political charisma that Bill Clinton had. Claire does not love Frank. She does not love anyone, and her description later in the series on of multiple abortions shows a sort of delight in destruction of her own family. Claire is not just cold, she’s glacial. And when Frank fails to live up to what Claire expects of him in terms of political help, she’s willing to betray him.

I don’t think I’m spoiling the plot to let you know that the series starts out with Frank as a Senator and Claire running a non-governmental organization. In the middle, Frank is President and Claire is floundering in a political job as some kind of Ambassador. It ends with Claire as President and Frank in the grave.

For a long time, it was hard for me not to see this as the Bill and Hillary show. Hillary was not as elegant or attractive as Claire Underwood, but she was just as ambitious, cold hearted, and cruel. Claire Underwood at one point in the story reveals that she does not value—or even consider—her own happiness. Everything for her is about power. Frank at least likes good food, old friends, young women, and occasionally gentlemen with discretion.

I started re-watching House of Cards because I am now wondering if this isn’t a better summation of the story of Joe and Jill Biden. Joe, in his day, was able to con the world with his fictional working-class “lunch bucket Joe” stories, his easy smile, and Dad jokes. Joe was the guy with charisma and I suspect that he actually loved Jill, at lest when he could still recognize her. Jill always supported Joe’s political ambitions. He was a Senator when she married him, but with her support, he rose to become Vice President and then President. Jill was his cheerleader every step of the way. Remember, Jill did not marry “lunch bucket Joe.” She never even met him. She married Senator Biden, a man with overt White House ambitions.

But somewhere else along the way—in her middle age—Jill got restless and embarked on getting a Ed.D, a doctoral degree in education. She got it from the University of Delaware, which could not be more Biden friendly. Delaware is a “Biden state.” The Bidens all but own it, and the University of Delaware has buildings named for the Bidens. If the University of Delaware had had the program, they would have awarded Jill a PhD in nuclear physics if she asked. But this pursuit of a degree and her current teaching work suggests to me that Jill was getting restless. She needed recognition.

It's her turn.

And it appears that she is maneuvering with all the cunning of Claire Underwood. Jill is too old and too clumsy (and quite frankly, too dumb) to get elected POTUS. She is no Claire Underwood in that respect. But what Jill lacks in ability, she makes up for in raw, ugly ambition. Jill found herself in January 2021 in the White House. Her husband clearly had dementia; emails from Hunter suggest what we all know—the family knew Biden’s mental abilities were capsizing way back in 2018. Jill had no other route to power except to prop him up. And she went from just guiding him from the background at various events to running the White House.

The Underwoods had the good sense to not reproduce so there were no family dramas or drug-addicted kids or illegitimate granddaughters in House of Cards. The Bidens, on the other hand, are both a crime family and a dysfunctional family. Hunter and his father worked together on various corrupt enterprises. Biden payola rarely went directly to Joe or Jill, as far as Representative James Comer has found to date. Instead, cash just boomeranged around the family. Joe got his sister Valerie, his brothers Frank and Jim, his son Hunter, and sometimes others like cousins involved in the family enterprises. There may also be some more distant Biden relations involved. Everyone in the family had to know what was going on. Joe was cognitively impaired, Hunter was busy peddling influence and snorting cocaine, Jim and Frank cashed the checks, and Jill would run the country. The family business was predicated on making sure that no one found out Joe was nearing the end of his life.

That was the irony. Jill got exactly what she wanted—but at the point where Joe could no longer be much use to her except as a prop.

The unspeakable cruelty of Jill Biden is what made me go back to House of Cards. In that fictional story, it is hard to appreciate how unrelentingly cruel Claire Underwood could be. She loved no one. And that is why I have come to understand Jill Biden. She wants to play-act as President because she wants the trappings: AirForce 1, servants, the prestigious White House address, elegant parties, important meetings with dignitaries, and covers of Vogue magazine. It’s a sweet gig because she does not have to deal with crafting actual policy or being grilled by the press. She just enjoys the pomp and ceremony without too much of the work.

Wonder why the White House is a freak show with incoherent policies? Meet Jill Biden!

To step into her semi-Presidency role, Jill has to crush her husband. Many older men are concerned about their legacy, particularly politicians who have this notion that they are historical figures and important people. Joe Biden has long ago lost what puny little legacy his decades in the Senate and Executive Branch might have conferred on him. He will be forever remembered by those of us who endured his reign of error and all history books as the guy with dementia who ran the country. He will be remembered as the guy whose every foreign policy decision was wrong. He will be remembered for an open border and a disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan. His legacy will be a gag reel of gaffes. He will be immortalized for falling off his bicycle and wearing adult diapers. People years from now will ponder how a nation as powerful as America could have been hoodwinked for so long.

Jill exposes Joe constantly to situations where he has little hope to succeed. He embarrasses himself in national debates or international ceremonies. He is ridiculous whenever he is interviewed. He grabs and caresses other people’s children in ways that would get lesser men arrested. Jill could protect him, but she does not. Instead, she turns up the heat. Knowing that Joe is unable to speak well and likely to say incredibly embarrassing things, she sets him up in situations where he is forced to speak and almost assuredly to embarrass himself.

So what is going on? I once thought that Jill hated Joe. After years of playing second fiddle to him and not getting much of a role on the world stage or too many magazine covers, I figured that maybe Jill just snapped. Maybe Joe and Jill had the same deal the Underwoods did—that the man would rise to power first and then bring the wife along right behind him. Maybe Jill felt betrayed. She certainly felt left behind.

Or … maybe Jill hates Joe for other reasons. It seems quite plausible that Joe molested adolescent Ashley, Jill’s only child. Ashley said as much—in writing. And confirmed it. It’s public record. Imagine having your daughter be on record as saying she was molested by your husband. That could make a wife mad. Yet Jill did not seem particularly perturbed by the discovery of Ashley’s diary, likely because she knew what Joe was doing to Ashley.

I don’t think Jill is angry that Joe molested their daughter, or that he was corrupt, that he ran cons, that he laundered money, or that he did other things that might have caused a more proper wife to raise concerns. I think Jill just hit that moment—which Hillary had in 2016—where she just screamed, “It’s my turn!”

And so Jill has seized power from her husband. Claire Underwood did the same with Frank, although in a more intellectually satisfying way. Jill just waited for Joe to lose his mind and then paraded him around the world stage like an incredibly embarrassing trained monkey in a little red vest clapping cymbals together … while she gave the orders and sipped champagne.

Sort of like Nero fiddling while Rome burned.

Claire Underwood at least outmaneuvered her husband to get into office. In the end, Claire turned out to be less capable and less intelligent than her husband was, but she at least had a couple of moves. She at least clawed her way into the office under her own name.

Some people say that Obama is controlling Biden, but if that were the case, Biden would not be running for President. No one wants Biden out of the next Presidential race more than Barack. The purported Barack and Joe bromance is a myth. They hate each other. Biden thinks Barack is overrated and Barack thinks Joe is a moron. Barack Obama is using Joe Biden, in the same way that Jill is using Joe … but just to different ends. However, their objectives diverge. Obama’s agenda has to be ending Joe’s political career and Jill’s agenda is the exact opposite: she wants him to stay in power.

I think that Obama tried and is still trying to exert influence on Joe, but he can’t always get past Jill. That makes me wonder if Jill does not have considerable dirt on Obama. There is not too much bad that you could say about Obama that I have not already heard, but Obama is fairly thin-skinned. Maybe Jill has photographs or other proof that Mr. Obama has had boyfriends in office. That Barack is a closeted homosexual. That he uses drugs. Maybe she has a Kenyan birth certificate in her safe. Maybe she went to 23andMe with Michelle’s DNA. There is not much that you could say to me that would lower my current opinion of Barack Obama, but … perhaps Obama thinks he has fooled the world. So maybe Jill has stuff on Obama that he does not want released. Maybe she exerts her influence that way.

Or maybe she just tells Joe what to do and Joe agrees. After all, Joe can’t drop out of the Presidential race or quit the White House unless he agrees to do those things.

There is also the possibility that Joe was once somewhat under Obama’s control but he got more and more unruly as his mental deficiencies increased. Dementia patients often start out moderately compliant but become more and more unruly, combative, and unrealistic as the disease progresses. So it could be Obama installed Joe as his puppet but lost control of the strings. And Joe no doubt likes Jill way more than he ever liked Barack.

It's like a line in House of Cards, where Frank Underwood says that he loves Claire … the same way sharks love blood.

This much is true: Jill has control. Jill could pull Biden out of the race in a minute if she wanted. She could restore his honor and dignity and maybe salvage a bit of his presidential legacy. She could give him the comfort of long naps and elder care in what surely are his twilight years. She could get him a recliner and a cup of tea and pull him out of the spotlight for a bit of peace.

She won’t. She’s Claire Underwood.

And don’t forget that Joe did the same to Hunter. Whether you like him or despise him, Hunter is a drug addict and a sex addict. Those are not easy problems to solve. If you’ve ever known a hardcore drug addict, you know that they have a lot of trouble doing even ordinary things. They do not deal well with even moderate pressure. They have trouble making decisions, they get mixed up easily. They can be overly emotional one minute and oblivious to danger the next. They often gleefully take unnecessary risks. They like to take naked pictures of themselves. They can’t keep track of their possessions or remember details. A drug addict can go on a walk with you and lose his shoes on the way. So Joe, knowing his only surviving son’s issues with addiction, sends him out into the high-stakes, high-pressure world of money laundering and political influence peddling. Hunter is dealing with the biggest international sharks in global politics. Of course, Hunter is an attorney; he knew how to set up shell corporations and such. But he was not equipped to be put into international settings with dangerous characters and briefcases full of money. Over and over, Papa Joe put Hunter into situations where Hunter might very well have overdosed or made a mistake in dealing with international cut-throats that could have cost him his freedom or his life. Yet Joe kept sending Hunter out. I think if Hunter had overdosed along the way in one of those big expensive European or Chinese hotel suites, Joe would have barely paused and sent his brother Jim out next.

So maybe Joe is only now reaping what he’s sown. He threw Hunter into perilous situations that no doubt fueled his addictions. You have to be unspeakably cruel to set your own son up to fail and risk overdose.

Now Jill is showing no mercy as she watches Joe’s brain deteriorate. She flies back and forth on the Presidential jet. (You know when she went with Joe to France for the D-Day commemoration, Jill flew back and forth to the States for Hunter’s trials … she used AirForce 1 like it was an Uber, backtracking as it suited her. Those sort of high-profile turnaround flights are hell on the Secret Service and the transportation people, but no doubt Jill enjoyed watching crews of high-dollar “servants” scramble to accommodate her daily whims.) Jill commandeered the Secret Service to guard her as she spoke at a dinner of Italian-Americans on the very day Trump was shot. She sees herself as the most important figure in the world.

If you’ve never seen House of Cards, it’s worth a watch. It’s a long series, lots of plots and subplots, but very intriguing. You’ll probably hate everybody in the show, but still want to see what happens next. The best thing about the show to me is a cinematic device that’s used where Frank Underwood at times speaks directly to the camera. It allows us to hear what he’s thinking—and he’s a very manipulative man. So we often see him doing one thing while telling us another. It’s like having a window into the soul of a very charming narcissist. Frank Underwood is evil, but he’s a disarming kind of evil with a Southern drawl who is quick to make a joke and self-deprecating enough to, on occasion, call himself “white trash.” Joe is not nearly as endearing as Frank. In some ways, Frank Underwood is much more a portrait of Bill Clinton that Joe Biden.

But Jill Biden is Claire Underwood, the evil mastermind of the Biden dynasty. And, like Claire, she overestimates her own intelligence.