Joe Biden

Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. was born on November 20, 1942, in Scranton, Pennsylvania, the oldest child of a working-class Irish Catholic family. When his father’s business fortunes collapsed after World War II, Joe Sr. took whatever work he could find; in 1953 he found a job selling cars and moved the family to Delaware. Young Joe had a severe stutter. Classmates at his Catholic high school mocked him as “Dash” — “I talked like Morse code,” he later wrote — and he practiced in front of a mirror, memorizing Yeats and Emerson, until he largely overcame it. As a boy of about ten he accepted a $5 dare to climb a smoldering 200-foot heap of coal-mine waste. A star halfback in high school, he went to the University of Delaware and Syracuse University law school, briefly worked for a corporate law firm, and then became a public defender in Wilmington.

In 1972, at twenty-nine, he challenged a popular two-term Republican senator, J. Caleb Boggs, and won by fewer than 3,000 votes. On December 18, before he took office, a tractor trailer struck his wife Neilia’s car while she was Christmas shopping, killing her and their infant daughter, Naomi, and badly injuring their sons, Beau and Hunter. Biden considered giving up the seat; persuaded by fellow senators, he was sworn in at the hospital chapel beside his sons, and for years commuted home to Wilmington every day by train. In 1977 he married Jill Jacobs.

In the Senate Biden became a leading figure on the Judiciary and Foreign Relations Committees and chaired the confirmation hearings of five Supreme Court justices, including the bitterly contested nominations of Robert Bork and Clarence Thomas. After failed presidential runs in 1988 and 2008, he became Barack Obama’s running mate in 2008 and a close partner as vice president. Grieving the death of his son Beau from cancer in 2015, he did not run in 2016, but he entered the 2020 race against Trump, declaring, “We are in the battle for the soul of this nation.” With Senator Kamala Harris as his running mate — the first woman, first Black, and first South Asian American vice president — he won in 2020.

Biden took office on January 20, 2021, two weeks after the attack on the Capitol, amid a pandemic that eventually killed more than 1.1 million Americans. He signed the American Rescue Plan, which sent relief payments and expanded the child tax credit, and pushed vaccine distribution. With Republican votes he passed the $1.2 trillion Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act; in August 2022 he signed the CHIPS and Science Act for semiconductor research and manufacturing and the Inflation Reduction Act, which lowered prescription drug prices and invested in domestic energy production, especially clean energy. He also signed laws making Juneteenth a national holiday, protecting same-sex marriage, and finally outlawing lynching (the Emmett Till Antilynching Act), and he rejoined the Paris climate agreement and the World Health Organization on taking office. When Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, he led more than fifty countries in sending aid to Ukraine.

Biden presented himself as a believer in bipartisan deal-making, the institutions of the Senate, and American alliances, and his political identity rested on his working-class roots and personal resilience. He rejected Trump’s “America First” approach in favor of rebuilding ties with allies and bodies such as NATO, and he supported abortion rights, calling the Supreme Court’s 2022 decision overturning Roe v. Wade a “tragic error.”

The withdrawal from Afghanistan in August 2021, carrying out the agreement Trump had made with the Taliban, turned chaotic: the Afghan government collapsed, the Taliban took Kabul, and a suicide bomber killed thirteen American service members at the airport. His approval ratings fell and never recovered. Inflation reached 7 percent in his first year; Republicans blamed his spending, including the infrastructure law’s price tag, and although inflation fell below 3 percent by 2024, many Americans felt worse off. Encounters at the southern border nearly doubled to more than two million a year. Critics also faulted his reliance on officials from the Obama years, and the Supreme Court struck down his broadest student-debt relief plan. Questions about his age grew, and after a disastrous debate performance against Trump in 2024 he withdrew from the race.

Biden endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris, who became the Democratic nominee but lost the 2024 election to Trump. He left office on January 20, 2025, as the economy, by most major indicators, had recovered from the pandemic faster than those of comparable nations — though many voters did not feel it in their household budgets. Historians are only beginning to assess his single term, which fell between Trump’s two.