US Presidential: Six Things You Didn't Know About Joe Biden

After a long, long wait, the results of the US presidential election are in.

Democratic candidate Joe Biden is elected 46th President of the United States and replaces Donald Trump in the White House.

If he is known to have been the former vice-president of Barack Obama, the personality of the new president of the United States remains largely unknown.

Here are six things to know about the new leader of the world's leading power. 

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 - Do you really know the American elections?

A family pain that "never goes away"

The almost 78-year-old new President of the United States has faced a tragic family history.

One evening in December 1972, Joe Biden lost his wife Neilia Hunter, whom he had met while studying law at Syracuse University, in a car accident.

Her 13-month-old daughter Naomi also died instantly.

The couple's two sons survive, but they are seriously injured.

He then raises his sons with the help of his sister, Valerie.

Five years later, Joe Biden remarried with Jill Tracy Jacobs with whom he had a daughter, Ashley, born in 1981. It would be the two surviving sons, Beau and Hunter, who would have pushed him to remarry.

Joe Biden writes in his memoir that Jill Tracy Jacobs "brought him back to life".

In 2015, Joe Biden lost a second child: his son Beau Biden died at the age of 46 from brain cancer.

This dramatic event will push him to support Obamacare, the law on medical coverage in the United States.

It took him three nominations to become president

Joe Biden has run for the Democratic primaries twice before arriving at the White House.

His first unsuccessful attempt dates back to 1987. After three months of campaigning, Joe Biden was forced to stop everything.

And for good reason, he is accused of having plagiarized a speech by Neil Gordon Kinnock, the leader of the Labor Party in the United Kingdom.

His second attempt took place in 2007. In the primaries, he faced Barack Obama whom he described as "the first African-American who speaks well, shiny, clean on himself and a handsome boy".

A phrase that is not at all accepted by American public opinion.

Result: he gets only 1% of the vote.

Finally, he will be drafted by Barack Obama who chooses him as running mate and therefore vice-president during his two terms at the head of the country.

47 years of political life

If Joe Biden has been able to run for the American presidency three times, it is also because he has always been part of the political life of the United States.

He is indeed the oldest American president in all of history.

The veteran of American politics served on New Castle County Council for two years before beginning his national career at 29 as a senator from Delaware.

He was re-elected continuously until 2008.

Partly because of the family tragedies he went through, Joe Biden forged himself as a loving father in American public opinion and made compassion one of his famous political traits.

He voted for the war in Iraq

In 2002, Joe Biden was then chairman of the US Senate Foreign Affairs Committee.

At that time, he voted for the war in Iraq against Saddam Hussein which will last from 2003 to 2011. But above all, Joe Biden confessed to having organized the hearing of many witnesses who led to believe, wrongly, that the Saddam regime Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction.

The former Delaware senator has since admitted it was a "mistake".

PODCAST - (Re) listen to Mister President

Political scientist Olivier Duhamel tells you the incredible story of the American presidential elections since 1948, from Truman to Obama, from Kennedy to Clinton, including the Bushes, father and son ... 

>>> Find the 12 episodes on our Europe1.fr site, on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, SoundCloud or your usual listening platforms.

He is used to blunders

During the presidential campaign, Donald Trump regularly made fun of the new president of the United States by nicknamed him "Joe asleep".

Many videos of him as a child and he stuttered circulated on social media.

Donald Trump thus attacked the side "king of the blunder" specific to Joe Biden.

And as proof, the new American president had notably insisted, in 2008, for an elected representative of Missouri to stand up during a meeting, before realizing that he was in a wheelchair… During the campaign for this election Presidential, he also confused Theresa May, the former British Prime Minister, with Margaret Thatcher, who held that post in the 1980s.

Charges of sexual assault and harassment

But another facet of the American politician has emerged in the media in recent years.

At the beginning of the year 2020, Tara Reade, a former collaborator of Joe Biden, accuses him of having sexually assaulted him in 1993. "These allegations are not true. It never happened", had then retorted the new tenant of the White House.

However, several women have already accused Joe Biden of "inappropriate gestures" such as Lucy Flores, a former Democrat in the Nevada Assembly who speaks of an inappropriate kiss "on the top of the head" in 2014. Same thing for Amy Lappos, former congressional assistance, who accuses him of having touched him with inappropriate marnière in 2009, during a fundraiser.

Joe Biden then defended himself by saying that it was, for him, "marks of affection".