Joe Biden

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Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. (BY-dən) is an American politician who is the 46th and current president of the United States. A 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 US Senate from 1973 to 2009. A resident of Delaware since the age of 12, Biden entered local politics in 1970 and became a senator in 1972. As senator, Biden represented the deregulating interests of the ruling class of Delaware, a tax haven with lenient corporate law since the 19th century.[1] He also notably drafted and led the effort to pass the 1994 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act and oversaw several US Supreme Court confirmation hearings, particularly helping to downplay the sexual harassment testimony of several women against now-Justice Clarence Thomas.[2] Biden ran for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1988, but failed due to a number of scandals, including for falsely claiming that he had been an activist in the 1960s Civil Rights movement[citation needed]. In the 2020 election, Biden and his running mate, Kamala Harris, defeated incumbents Donald Trump and Mike Pence. Biden, born in 1942 and technically older than the baby boomer generation, is the oldest serving president in US history.

Biden's 2021 "Build Back Better Act" proposed to repair failing US infrastructure, but it failed in the US Senate, although aspects were later incorporated into Biden's Inflation Reduction Act in 2022. Biden appointed left-liberal jurist Ketanji Brown Jackson to the Supreme Court. In August 2021, Biden oversaw the final withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan after nearly 20 years of war, resulting in the collapse of the US-aligned liberal Afghan government and the restoration of Taliban control. He responded to the Russian invasion of Ukraine by imposing sanctions on Russia and authorizing massive aid packages to Kiev. During the 2023 Israeli onslaught on Gaza, Biden, a longtime hardline Zionist, has maintained an unequivocal, reactionary and essentially unconditioned support the Israeli state's actions.

Biden has arguably responded poorly to a period of serious crisis for the United States, including the social and economic impact of the COVID pandemic, abysmal inequality, right-wing attacks on abortion and LGBT rights, the growth of the Donald Trump "MAGA" movement, and serious escalation in the Ukraine, Gaza, Yemen, the Middle East, and against China in the worsening New Cold War. Despite his approval rate hitting an all-time low in 2024 and the trending of the #GenocideJoe hashtag, Biden remains the presumptive 2024 Democratic candidate for president.

Notes

References

  1. Murphy, Tim (11 Nov 2019). "How Joe Biden helped build a financial system that's great for Delaware banks and terrible for the rest of us". Mother Jones. Retrieved 4 Feb 2024.
  2. Zhou, Li (27 Mar 2019). "Joe Biden finally takes "responsibility" for his role in the Anita Hill hearings". Vox. Retrieved 4 Feb 2024.