Open Threads

I was 4,000 miles from home when the text woke me up. My sister, Edwine, back in New York: “Mummy is sick. Call me.” I had flown into Poland the night before. Ukraine was months into war with Russia, and Biden had made a secret trip to Ukraine to visit Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

Despite the historic nature of the trip, a crisis at home began to consume me. My mom had been complaining of abdominal pain for a while—I still kick myself for not paying more attention. When the pain ratcheted up, my brother took her to the nearest hospital, and eventually she was taken into surgery. Although my mom would refuse to acknowledge it for another eight months, the surgery confirmed a diagnosis: She had stage II colon cancer. My mother has always been a private person. When she finally acquiesced to reality, she told me: “Don’t tell anyone. Do not tell the president I have cancer.”

In this way, I take after my mom. For almost three years, I spent every day working in one of the most public jobs in the world: White House press secretary. My job was literally to represent the president of the United States of America. From behind the lectern in the briefing room, every day, I faced the press, the American people, and the world. And every day, I kept my personal life hidden. In fact, it won’t be until reading this that the people I have worked 16-hour days with, traveled across continents with, will learn that for almost two years, I have been silently working a second full-time job, which is navigating my mother’s care. It’s not just because I’m a private person that I withheld this information.

It’s also because I’m a first. I’m the first Black press secretary. The first person of color press secretary. The first openly queer press secretary. The first Haitian American immigrant press secretary. The first press secretary to be all of the above. Being a first meant that my responsibilities were beyond those in the job description, the load heavier. I bear a certain responsibility to the communities I represent…

Looking back now at the French state dinner, the signs of my mom’s decline were there. Shaky on her feet, she needed me to stabilize her. My mom spent decades of her life as a home health care aide and as the nucleus of our family, holding so many people up. Now she needed someone else to do the holding. President Biden was one of only a few people at the White House I ever told about my mom. Biden is a man who knows grief better than anyone should. He knows that grief doesn’t only occur when someone passes, but when someone changes, irrevocably, from the person you knew.

As I grieved the mom I knew, the president showed up for me. For more than 18 months, I drove up to New York every weekend I could to see my mom, often returning to DC late at night just to get a few hours of sleep before heading to the White House early the next morning (my days began with a 7:30 a.m. team call). She was in the hospital for three months. My brother visited her each morning, and my sister came on the days she could manage off from work. I did what I could from DC. My brother put me on the phone when the hospital was giving them the runaround. I demanded the names of specific doctors, told my siblings what phone numbers to track down for me so I could make calls myself. I never used my position to pull strings, but I did use my expertise, and I never stopped advocating for my mother.

Once treatment finally began, we had to change her health insurance plan four or five times so that she could get the care the doctors recommended. By the time we’d successfully get her onto a new plan, her care team would ask us why she hadn’t already started the treatment. At one point her rehab clinic tried to charge her for the wheelchair she came in with. I worked for President Obama; I am extremely proud of the Affordable Care Act. I was equally as proud to work with President Biden to lower the costs of prescription drugs and begin to tackle this country’s medical debt crisis. But our health care system is still too expensive, too hard to navigate, and too inaccessible…

Some people, on the other hand, ‘take no responsibility whatever’...

We keep getting reminders of how deeply Trump and his team are embedded in the right-wing bubble. The post-air-disaster press conference was a particularly acute example. Gift link: wapo.st/4gj9iRP

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— Philip Bump (@pbump.com) January 31, 2025 at 2:46 PM

(If only!)