Objective: In the first 100 days of his U.S. presidency, Joe Biden sought to comfort Americans who had lost loved ones to the pandemic and to initiate a surprisingly progressive policy agenda. I interpret these two cardinal features of his early presidency in terms of two traumatic losses in Biden's personal life, contextualizing the argument within a 3-tiered model of personality.
Method: This psychobiography of a single case mainly follows an inductive, grounded-theory approach that aims to find patterns in the data that both explain a life and link to evidence-based constructs in psychological science.
Results: As Biden understands his own life story, the deaths of his wife and daughter in 1972 and first-born adult son in 2015 forged an empathic sensibility that enables him to connect deeply with other Americans through shared grief and pain. These two traumatic events also inform the uniquely conciliatory approach he followed to instigate social change.
Conclusions: The first 100 days of the Biden presidency provide a striking example of how a particular person's life history comes to meet the broader historical moment. The findings have implications for how personality researchers think about redemptive life stories and the nature of late-life narrative identity.
Keywords: Joe Biden; empathy; narrative identity; psychobiography; redemptive stories.
© 2022 The Author. Journal of Personality published by Wiley Periodicals LLC.