Joe Biden

Joe Biden was the 46th president. He served one term, from 2021 to 2025. He is a Democrat from the small state of Delaware, which he represented in the Senate for about thirty-six years — from 1973 until he became vice president. He had already been Barack Obama's vice president from 2009 to 2017, then won the presidency himself in 2020. People nicknamed him Amtrak Joe because he rode the train so often between Delaware and Washington that crews knew him. He set a modern record as the oldest person to serve as president: 78 at his inauguration and 82 when he left (he was born in 1942). His vice president was Kamala Harris, a former California senator and the first woman to hold that office. Compared with Trump, Biden's résumé was a long Washington career: Senate, then vice president — the opposite of an outsider.

Early in the term a main COVID job was pushing shots and a large relief bill while the pandemic was still on. Vaccines had been developed under Trump's Operation Warp Speed; Biden's team ran a wider rollout and signed the American Rescue Plan in 2021. A 2021 infrastructure law paid for bridges, roads, broadband, and transit. The CHIPS Act tried to boost U.S. semiconductor (computer chip) factories. Congress later passed a law named the Inflation Reduction Act — but in 2021–22 inflation hit a 40-year high, peaking above 9 percent, the worst stretch since the early 1980s. A law's name and the thing it names are not always the same.

The U.S. exit from Afghanistan in August 2021 was a chaotic withdrawal. A suicide bombing killed 13 U.S. service members. After Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, the Biden administration sent large amounts of U.S. aid to Ukraine. At the southern border, Customs and Border Protection logged record numbers of migrant encounters and crossings. He appointed Ketanji Brown Jackson to the Supreme Court in 2022. In 2024 he ran again, then dropped out after a poor debate performance raised doubts about his age and stamina. Donald Trump won the 2024 election and succeeded him in January 2025 as the 47th president.