“[The President] he had so many hopes and plans for things he wanted to do, but every time you turned around, he had to deal with the problems of the moment,” Biden said, speaking to about two dozen attendees at a private home on the popular vacation island. the Massachusetts coast. Biden also announced that he expects to meet next week with Olena Zelenska, Ukraine’s first lady, with whom he last met in May during an unannounced trip to Ukraine. She did not specify the agenda of her upcoming meeting, and CNN reached out to Biden’s office for more details. On the domestic front, Biden noted gun violence, the Supreme Court’s landmark Roe v. Wade decision and the war in Ukraine as problems that the President had not foreseen. “They just threw so many things at him,” he said. “Who would have ever imagined what happened [with the Supreme Court overturning] Roe v. Wade? Well, maybe we saw it coming, but we still didn’t believe it. Gun violence in this country is absolutely horrific. We didn’t see the war in Ukraine coming.” Biden said she, too, felt stressed in her role as first lady and had been unresponsively pulled in other directions from the course she originally intended. “I was saying to myself, ‘OK, I was second lady. I used to work at community colleges. I worked with military families. I’ve worked on cancer”. These were supposed to be my areas of focus [in the White House,] I had to become, with all that was happening, the first lady of the moment.” The first lady shared her dismay at last month’s overturning of Roe v. Wade, which ended the federal constitutional right to abortion. Biden added that while he supported the right to protest, being angry about the decision, in her opinion, was not enough — contrary to the President’s remarks last week, where he encouraged women to “keep protesting.” adding that the protest is “of critical importance. “ Biden said he told her family members they should think about doing more than protesting. “So many young girls, including my own granddaughters, went up to the Supreme Court and marched. I’m like, ‘Okay, good for you. But what will you do next? You feel good about yourself for speaking your mind, but what do you do next? What’s your plan?’” The White House has acknowledged that the road to restoring abortion rights is narrow and currently uncertain. Biden also criticized Congress during her remarks, blaming Republicans for the administration’s dead-end agenda. Joe Biden’s sweeping Build Back Better plan — which would have expanded the nation’s social safety net — suffered its latest blow this week when West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin, a moderate Democrat, rejected including any climate or tax provisions in the bill. In a closely divided Senate, Democrats needed Manchin’s support to pass legislation along party lines in a process called fiscal reconciliation, which requires all 50 members of the Democratic caucus to agree to advance legislation . “I know there are so many naysayers who say we’re going to get hammered in the midterms. OK. Republicans are working hard, staying united, for better or for worse. So we just have to work harder,” he said. . Saturday’s event marked the second DNC fundraiser attended by the first lady during a two-day adventure in Massachusetts. On Thursday, he made remarks, mostly focused on political action, at a private event in Andover. CNN’s Jasmine Wright contributed to this report.
