President Joe Biden

 

Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. , (born November 20, 1942) is an American politician who is the 46th and current president of the United States. Ideologically a moderate member of the Democratic Party, he previously served as the 47th vice president from 2009 to 2017 under President Barack Obama and represented Delaware in the United States Senate from 1973 to 2009.

Born in Scranton, Pennsylvania, Biden moved with his family to Delaware in 1953. He studied at the University of Delaware before earning his law degree from Syracuse University. He was elected to the New Castle County Council in 1970 and to the U.S. Senate in 1972. As a senator, Biden drafted and led the effort to pass the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act and the Violence Against Women Act. He also oversaw six U.S. Supreme Court confirmation hearings, including the contentious hearings for Robert Bork and Clarence Thomas. Biden ran unsuccessfully for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1988 and 2008. In 2008, Obama chose Biden as his running mate, and Biden was a close counselor to Obama during his two terms as vice president. In the 2020 presidential election, Biden and his running mate, Kamala Harris, defeated incumbents Donald Trump and Mike Pence. Biden is the second Catholic president in U.S. history (after John F. Kennedy), and his politics have been widely described as profoundly influenced by Catholic social teaching.

Taking office at age 78, Biden is the oldest president in U.S. history, the first to have a female vice president, and the first from Delaware. In 2021, he signed a bipartisan infrastructure bill, as well as a $1.9 trillion economic stimulus package in response to the COVID-19 pandemic and its related recession. Biden proposed the Build Back Better Act, which failed in Congress, but aspects of which were incorporated into the Inflation Reduction Act that was signed into law in 2022. Biden also signed the bipartisan CHIPS and Science Act, which focused on manufacturing, appointed Ketanji Brown Jackson to the Supreme Court and worked with congressional Republicans to prevent a first-ever national default by negotiating a deal to raise the debt ceiling. In foreign policy, Biden restored America's membership in the Paris Agreement. He oversaw the complete withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan that ended the war in Afghanistan, during which the Afghan government collapsed and the Taliban seized control. Biden has responded to the Russian invasion of Ukraine by imposing sanctions on Russia and authorizing civilian and military aid to Ukraine. During the 2023 Israel–Hamas war, Biden announced American military support for Israel, and condemned the actions of Hamas and other Palestinian militants as terrorism. In April 2023, he announced his candidacy for the Democratic Party nomination in the 2024 presidential election.

On December 18, 1972, a few weeks after Biden was elected senator, his wife Neilia and one-year-old daughter Naomi were killed in an automobile accident while Christmas shopping in Hockessin, Delaware. Neilia's station wagon was hit by a semi-trailer truck as she pulled out from an intersection. Their sons Beau (aged 3) and Hunter (aged 2) were taken to the hospital in fair condition, Beau with a broken leg and other wounds and Hunter with a minor skull fracture and other head injuries. Biden considered resigning to care for them, but Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield persuaded him not to.The accident filled Biden with anger and religious doubt. He wrote that he "felt God had played a horrible trick" on him^] and he had trouble focusing on work.

Biden met the teacher Jill Tracy Jacobs in 1975 on a blind date. They married at the United Nations chapel in New York on June 17, 1977.They spent their honeymoon at Lake Balaton in the Hungarian People's Republic. Biden credits her with the renewal of his interest in politics and life. Biden is Roman Catholic and attends Mass with his wife, Jill, at St. Joseph's on the Brandywine in Greenville, Delaware. Their daughter, Ashley Biden, is a social worker, and is married to physician Howard Krein. Beau Biden became an Army Judge Advocate in Iraq and later Delaware Attorney General before dying of brain cancer in 2015. Hunter Biden worked as a Washington lobbyist and investment adviser; his business dealings and personal life came under significant scrutiny during his father's presidency.

In February 1988, after several episodes of increasingly severe neck pain, Biden underwent surgery to correct a leaking intracranial berry aneurysm. While recuperating, he suffered a pulmonary embolism, a serious complication. After a second aneurysm was surgically repaired in May, Biden's recuperation kept him away from the Senate for seven months.

Wikipedia.