He has channeled personal tragedy into a heart-on-his-sleeve compassion for everyday Americans, but President-elect Joe Biden faces the challenge of a lifetime as he inherits a nation both traumatised and spellbound by his White House predecessor.

The United States democracy was dealt one of its biggest blows when President Donald Trump supporters, disgruntled with the election results, stormed into the US Capitol. The attack occured while the Congress was certifying Biden’s victory in the November presidential elections.

The country is also in the middle of a COVID-19 pandemic which has already claimed over 390,000 lives and infected over 23 million people in America.

Watch: Joe Biden on COVID-19

Biden, who cast himself as healer-in-chief during his campaign, will have challenges aplenty when he takes office on January 20.

From the youngest Senator to the oldest President

Biden has been on the US political stage for over 48 years. He hit the national stage in 1972 as a 29-year-old with a Senate win in Delaware.

He made Delaware his political domain. Before running for the Senate seat, Biden served as a lifeguard in a majority-Black neighborhood, an experience he said sharpened his awareness of systemic inequalities and strengthened his political interest.

Biden has made a bid for the White House twice before, in 1987 and 2008. In 2008, he dropped out after mustering less than 1% of the vote in Iowa’s caucuses. In the same year, he was picked by Barack Obama as his running mate. Obama dubbed him as ‘America’s happy warrior’.

Healer-in-chief

When he takes the oath of office on January 20, at age 78, Biden will be the oldest US head of state ever inaugurated.

A month after he became a Senator from Delaware, his wife Neilia and their one-year-old daughter Naomi were killed in a car crash while they were out Christmas shopping.

Biden’s two sons were severely injured but survived, only for the eldest, Beau, to succumb to cancer four decades later, in 2015.

Biden has always spoken poignantly of his personal encounters with tragedy and has been seen as someone who has nourished a capacity for genuine empathy — a quality that the country desperately needs as the COVID-19 toll climbs higher.

Biden met his second wife, teacher Jill Jacobs, in 1975 and they married two years later. They have a daughter, Ashley.

‘Middle class Joe’ who stutters

Joseph Robinette Biden Jr was born November 20, 1942 and raised in the Rust Belt town of Scranton, Pennsylvania, in an Irish-Catholic family.

His father was a car salesman. When the city went through tough times in the 1950s, Biden’s father lost his job and moved his family to the neighbouring Delaware. Joe Biden was 10 then.

He studied at the University of Delaware and the Syracuse University law school. During his long political career, he has often expressed pride that he is not a product of the elite Ivy League.

Biden touts his working-class roots and recalls being hampered as a child by a stutter. His stutter was so bad that he was cruelly nicknamed ‘Dash’.

But he overcame the condition, and on the campaign trail spoke about how he still counsels youngsters who stutter.

Taking over as President in these tumultuous times won’t be easy but it gives Biden an opportunity to guide the nation towards normalcy, towards his vision of America.  

“The work ahead of us will be hard, but I promise you this: I will be a President for all Americans,” the 46th US president-in-waiting said after he was announced as the winner.

His time to work on what he promised starts now. And he has the entire world looking at him.