The first lady, Jill Biden, is facing intense pushback from fans and foes alike after Vogue magazine on Monday unveiled her on the cover of its August edition, just days after President Biden’s disastrous debate performance against President Trump. The debate over Mr. Biden’s fitness for office has focused attention on the first lady’s influence over his thinking about whether to stay in the race. 

In the magazine profile, released digitally on Monday, Mrs. Biden details her own role as chief counselor to the president while working as a teacher. She discusses the pains of campaigning on her husband’s behalf. “Every campaign is important, and every campaign is hard,” the first lady says. “Each campaign is unique. But this one, the urgency is different. We know what’s at stake. Joe is asking the American people to come together to draw a line in the sand against all this vitriol.”

Throughout the feature, Mrs. Biden is photographed, by the noted celebrity photographer Norman Jean Roy in back offices, classrooms, on airport tarmacs, and at campaign events wearing thousands of dollars worth of clothing and jewelry, which is customary for photo subjects of the high end fashion bible. The profile opens with the details about how Mrs. Biden has become one of the most important people in the world by dint of her husband’s position.

At the top of the piece, an editor’s note clarifies that the interviews for the profile were conducted before Mr. Biden’s horrific debate on Thursday, but that Mrs. Biden stood behind him and that he would not give up on the campaign. The first family “will not let those 90 minutes define the four years he’s been president. We will continue to fight,” she told Vogue in comments made after the debate. 

Reaction to Mrs. Biden’s Vogue feature was harsh, to say the least. It didn’t get much better when social media users were told she was wearing a dress on the magazine cover that was priced at nearly $5,000. 

“Really great that the whole country has to be lit on fire by another Donald Trump presidency simply because Jill Biden wants a few extra months of getting herself on the cover of fashion magazines and so she won’t tell her husband to step aside,” writes a longtime advisor to Senator Sanders, David Sirota. 

One editor at Aeon Magazine, Sam Haselby, wrote in response to the Vogue cover that it was “hard to imagine a more imperious, anti-democratic self-presentation and sentiment.”

Congressman Tom Tiffany, a Republican from Wisconsin, wrote on X that the title of the Vogue feature should have been: “Jill Biden vows not to give up her power after Joe’s disastrous debate.”

A popular conservative commentator, Saagar Enjeti, compared Mrs. Biden to first lady Edith Wilson, the wife of President Wilson who functionally took over the role of president for more than a year between her husband’s debilitating stroke and his departure from office. 

One prominent lifestyle blogger from California, Jessica Reed Kraus, describes Mrs. Biden as a “modern day Lady MacBeth” who “is so desperate to maintain power she’s forcing her ailing husband to remain on a global stage despite accelerating decline.”

“Jill Biden is our Lady Macbeth — wedged somewhere between devotion and domination now that her husband’s power is in dire jeopardy,” Ms. Kraus writes. “His declining state has triggered mass political panic, while Jill, who should be most protective of him, stands firm in the face of mounting criticism.”

Ms. Kraus has millions of followers across multiple social media platforms, and is being courted by both the Trump and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. campaigns to be a supporter and surrogate using her large online platform. Semafor first reported that Ms. Kraus was invited to Mar-a-Lago and Trump’s victory party after the Iowa caucus victory. Mr. Kennedy later took Ms. Kraus surfing and for a day on a catamaran off the coast of her native California.