Thecomforter‐in‐chief: How two traumatic experiences shaped president joe Biden's first 100 days

Abstract

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.

Narrative Identity and the Redemptive Self: An Intellectual Autobiography, with Occasional Critique

“…Featuring the qualitative study of the individual case, psychobiography refers to the application of psychological research and theory to interpreting the lives of notable figures from history (Schultz, 2005). My own psychobiographical explorations have examined narrative identity in the lives of four American presidents: George W. Bush (McAdams, 2011), Barack Obama (McAdams, 2015, Donald Trump (McAdams, 2017(McAdams, , 2020, and Joe Biden (McAdams, 2022). The cases of Bush and Trump provide especially interesting insights regarding the stories people construct to make sense of their lives.…”