WASHINGTON (AP) – The new first lady, Jill Biden, took an unannounced visit to the US Capitol on Friday to deliver baskets of chocolate chip cookies to members of the National Guard, thanking them ‘for keeping me and my family safe’ during the inauguration of President Joe Biden.
“I just want to thank President Biden and the entire Biden family,” she told a group of Capitol guards. “The White House baked you some chocolate chip cookies,” she said before joking that she could not say she had baked them herself.
Joe Biden was sworn in on Wednesday, exactly two weeks after Donald Trump supporters rioted at the Capitol in a futile attempt to stop Congress from certifying Biden as the winner of the November presidential election. Extensive security measures were then taken for the inauguration, which proceeded without major incidents.
Jill Biden told the group that her late son, Beau, was a member of the National Guard of the Delaware Army who spent a year in Iraq in 2008-09. Beau Biden died of brain cancer in 2015 at the age of 46.
“I am therefore a national guard mother,” she said, adding that the baskets were a “small thank you” for leaving their homelands and coming to the country’s capital. President Biden thanked his chief of staff to the National Guard Bureau in a call Friday.
“I appreciate everything you do,” the first lady said. “The national guard will always occupy a special place in the heart of all the Prayers.”
Jill Biden’s unannounced troop visit comes after her first public outing as first lady.
She highlighted services for cancer patients at Whitman-Walker Health, an institution in Washington, with a history of HIV / AIDS patients and the LGBTQ community. The clinic receives federal money to provide primary care services in underserved areas.
Staff told the first lady that cancer screening had been down since March last year because patients refused to enter due to the coronavirus pandemic. More and more patients are taking advantage of the options to visit a doctor online.
When the issue of universal access to broadband internet came up, Jill Biden, who is a teacher, said she heard from teachers across the country who could not get in touch with their students due to the patchy access in some areas.
“We just have to work together and tackle some of these things,” she said. “The first thing we need to do is address this pandemic and get everyone vaccinated and get back to work and back to their schools and things back to normal.”