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: empathy, J

oe Biden, narrative identity, psychobiography, redemptive stories 1. INTRODUCTION In the November 2020 election, Joseph R. Biden defeated the incumbent Donald J. Trump to become the 46th President of the United States. When he was inaugurated on January 20, 2021, at the age of 78, Biden was the oldest man ever to assume occupancy of the Oval Office. The new President faced a litany of daunting challenges related to the Covid‐19 pandemic, the collapse of the world economy, racial strife in the United States, the mounting ramifications of global climate change, and existential threats to American democratic institutions, the latter starkly exhibited in the January 6 insurrection at the nation’s capital. Only hours after the riot at the U. S. Capitol building was quelled,

147 Republicans (139 in the House, 8 in the Senate) voted to overturn Biden’s electoral victory, effectively endorsing Donald Trump’s false claim that the election was stolen (Yourish et al., 2021). Nonetheless, President Biden promised to bring bipartisanship back to Washington. In the first 100 days of his administration, Biden worked to reverse many of Donald Trump’s initiatives (especially those relating to the environment and climate change), restore confidence and competence in government agencies, oversee the rollout of the Covid‐19 vaccines, diversify the judiciary, ease racial tensions, and improve America’s standing in the world community of nations. However, the two signature features that most dramatically marked the early days of his presidency were (1) his heartfelt efforts to comfort a grieving nation devastated by the pandemic (and riven by racial discord) and (2) his dogged pursuit of the most progressive economic policy agenda proposed by a Democratic administration in over 50 years, much of it aimed at helping the poor and bolstering the middle class. As such, Biden embraced two newfound roles. He became (1) a comforter for a suffering people and (2) a (reluctant) revolutionary for progressive change.