Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. (born November 20, 1942) was the forty-sixth President of the United States (2021 - 2025). Elected to the Senate from Delaware at 29, one of the youngest senators in American history, he served 36 years there, eight as Barack Obama's vice president, and finally, on his third try over three decades, won the presidency at 77, the oldest person elected to the office up to that time.
The long road
Born in Scranton, Pennsylvania, and raised in Delaware, Biden overcame a childhood stutter he never fully lost. Weeks after his 1972 Senate election, his wife Neilia and infant daughter Naomi were killed in a car crash; he was sworn in at his sons' hospital bedside and commuted home to Wilmington by train nearly every night for decades. In the Senate he chaired the Judiciary and Foreign Relations committees; as vice president he managed the Recovery Act and the Iraq drawdown. The death of his son Beau in 2015 kept him out of the 2016 race. He entered the 2020 campaign, he said, in response to the 2017 Charlottesville march, and defeated Donald Trump with 81 million votes, the most ever cast for a presidential candidate.
The Biden presidency
Taking office in the depths of the COVID-19 pandemic, two weeks after the January 6 Capitol attack, Biden's first year produced the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan and a mass vaccination campaign. A run of major legislation followed: the bipartisan Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (2021), the CHIPS and Science Act reviving domestic semiconductor manufacturing, and the Inflation Reduction Act (2022), the largest climate investment in history. Unemployment fell to a half-century low, though the sharpest inflation in forty years, peaking above 9 percent in mid-2022, defined the economy politically. He appointed Ketanji Brown Jackson, the first Black woman on the Supreme Court.
Abroad, Biden ended the twenty-year war in Afghanistan with a chaotic August 2021 withdrawal in which thirteen American service members died at the Kabul airport gate, the low point of his term. When Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, he rebuilt and expanded NATO, which added Finland and Sweden, and led the coalition arming Ukraine's defense. The October 7, 2023 Hamas attack on Israel and the Gaza war that followed dominated his final year of foreign policy.
The 2024 withdrawal
Biden sought reelection but, after a halting June 2024 debate performance intensified concerns about his age, withdrew from the race that July, endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris, the first incumbent to stand aside since Lyndon Johnson in 1968. He left office in January 2025; in May 2025 his office announced he had been diagnosed with an aggressive prostate cancer.
Highlights of the Biden presidency
- The American Rescue Plan and the vaccination campaign (2021).
- The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (2021).
- The CHIPS and Science Act and the Inflation Reduction Act (2022).
- NATO enlarged and the defense of Ukraine.
- Ketanji Brown Jackson, the first Black woman on the Supreme Court.