Who is Joe Biden?
Born in Scranton, Pennsylvania, in 1942, Joe Biden grew up in a working-class Irish Catholic family that later settled in Delaware. After law school he worked as a public defender. He won a US Senate seat in 1972 at just 29 and held it for 36 years. In that time he chaired the Judiciary Committee and the Foreign Relations Committee. Barack Obama picked him as running mate, so he was vice president from 2009 to 2017. Biden won the White House in 2020. In July 2024 he dropped his re-election campaign, and his term ended in January 2025.
Political views
- Early in his presidency he signed the American Rescue Plan. It paid cash to most taxpayers and enlarged the child tax credit.Source: millercenter.org
- He put his name to the $1.2 trillion Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, plus the CHIPS and Science Act to boost semiconductor production at home.Source: millercenter.org
- The Inflation Reduction Act he signed funded clean energy projects and aimed to cut what people pay for prescription drugs.Source: millercenter.org
- He took the US back into the Paris climate deal on day one. When Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, he gathered over 50 partner countries to help Kyiv.Source: millercenter.org
- He called the 2022 Dobbs ruling from the Supreme Court a tragic error, and he told agencies to defend access to reproductive health care.Source: millercenter.org
- In 2024 he raised tariffs on a range of Chinese imports, setting the rate on Chinese electric cars at 100 percent.Source: semafor.com
- As a senator he drafted the Senate's version of the 1994 crime law and also the Violence Against Women Act, the latter being the law he said made him proudest.Source: millercenter.org
Legacy
Supporters give Biden credit for a solid rebound after the pandemic recession, the largest government push on roads, bridges and clean energy in decades, a first major federal gun law in thirty years, and a NATO that stood together over Ukraine. Critics focus on high prices in 2021 and 2022, record numbers at the southern border, the chaotic end to the Afghanistan war in 2021 that cost 13 American lives, and doubts about his age that ended his run. Israel's war in Gaza, which followed Hamas's October 7, 2023 attack, split his party over his support. Critics also link his older crime bill with mass imprisonment and say he mishandled the Anita Hill hearings in 1991. Many in both parties disliked the pardon he gave his son Hunter in December 2024.