On Tuesday, President Biden visited a country that is extremely familiar to him: the United States. Virgin Islands – to relax, celebrate the new year with family, and take advantage of the nicer weather.
The president and his wife, first lady Jill Biden, flew from Washington on Tuesday to St. Croix, one of three islands that make up the U.S. territory in the Caribbean. St. John and St. Thomas are the other two islands. In addition to their granddaughters Natalie and Hunter, whose father was the late president’s son, Beau, the Bidens were joined by their daughter Ashley and her husband, Howard Krein.
Since at least 2009, when he served as vice president, from 2009 to 2017, Mr. Biden has taken vacations to the Caribbean island of St. Croix.
“We’ve missed him the last couple of years,” Beth Moss Mahar, a retired attorney and island resident for nearly three decades, said in a telephone interview.
In 2020 and 2021, Mr. Biden celebrated Christmas in his Delaware residence, primarily because to the COVID-19 epidemic. He will make his first trip to the U.S. Virgin Islands as president this week when he travels to St. Croix.
“We’re tremendously honored,” Del. Stacey Plaskett, a Democrat who represents the Virgin Islands in Congress, said in a telephone interview Tuesday.
“In the past, when he and his family have come, of course, sightings of President Biden were almost a thing of legend,” she said.
Now that Biden is recognized as one of the most influential men in the world, any sightings will be altered. As a result, he now travels with a lot more people than he did when he was vice president, including a sizable number of Americans. White House employees, Secret Service agents, and journalists covering the trip.
According to aides, Jill Biden like a beach, and Biden and his wife like to spend the week between Christmas and New Year’s Day in a warmer location.
“We always look forward to his coming and we really understand that this is a place of relaxation for him and Jill and whatever other family he may bring with him and so we leave him alone and let him just relax,” said Donna Christensen, who was Plaskett’s predecessor in Congress.
“He usually says, ‘In my next life, I’m living in St. Croix,'” she said in a telephone interview.
Plaskett and Christensen expressed the hope that the difficulties facing the United States will be highlighted as a result of attention being paid to where Biden spends his holiday. Threats from climate change, including stronger hurricanes and rising sea levels, as well as issues these governments have managing ageing infrastructure are present in the Virgin Islands and other US territories.
On January 2, Biden was supposed to return to Washington. Following the midterm elections in November, the Democratic Party will lose control of the House of Representatives on that day, potentially hampering Biden’s legislative agenda for the remaining two years of his term.
In the upcoming Congress, which will take office on January 3, Democrats will maintain control of the Senate.
