Bin Laden wanted him and Donald Trump feared him: Joe Biden failed but he rose to the very top

In May 2010, Osama bin Laden wrote a secret letter ordering his lieutenants to assassinate President Barack Obama — but not, crucially, Joe Biden, America’s vice president, who would take charge in the event of Obama’s death.

“Biden,” declared the world’s then-most wanted man, “is totally unprepared for that post, which will lead the U.S. into a crisis.”

History had other plans. A year later, Obama had Bin Laden killed — a move opposed, funnily enough, by Joe Biden, who felt his president was moving too quickly.

Almost a decade after that, Biden finally became Commander-in-Chief, triumphing over Donald Trump in arguably one of the most divisive presidential elections in U.S. history.

But Bin Laden was not altogether wrong in his assessment of Biden, who pulled out of the 2024 presidential race on Monday.

He failed often and throughout his long life — and somehow almost always managed to come out on top.

His rambling and incoherent performance in the first presidential debate of 2024 was one failure too many, however.

The world could see that he was not fit to lead the free world. Then last weekend a bullet ripped through the ear of Donald Trump as he campaigned for the presidency in Butler, Pennsylvania.

Trump’s defiant reaction in that moment — raising his fist and mouthing “fight fight fight!” — was the most potent contrast possible to Biden’s public frailty.

To cap it all, as Nancy Pelosi, the former House Speaker, and Obama manoeuvred against him, Biden caught a bad bout of COVID.

He withdrew to his mansion in Rehoboth, Delaware, and finally accepted his fate. In truth, concerns about Biden’s health had swirled around Washington long before he won the nomination in 2020.

Democrats spent years dismissing talk of dementia or any other condition as Republican scuttlebutt, yet Biden’s deteriorating mental and physical health ended up defining his presidency. It’s an odd coincidence that a bout of COVID pushed Biden to call time on his presidency — since he might never have won the Oval Office had it not been for the pandemic.

The lockdowns meant that Biden avoided excessive media scrutiny of his fitness for high office as he spent much of the year campaigning via Zoom calls from his basement in Delaware. He was also helped by Trump’s erratic response to the crisis, which alarmed Americans as the economy crashed.

In late May 2020, race riots erupted following the death of George Floyd under a policeman’s knee in Minneapolis. Cities burned across America and Trump proved himself unable to control the carnage.

Biden successfully pitched himself as the candidate who could bring back “normalcy” — and won.

Trump bitterly contested the result, which led to his supporters rioting on Capitol Hill on January 6. In his inauguration speech, Biden wisely appealed for unity.

“My whole soul is in this,” he said.

“Bringing America together. Uniting our people. Uniting our nation.”

He duly began his presidency with a healthy 55 per cent job approval score. But his popularity only sank from there.

At home, he sought to turbocharge America’s economic recovery through massive government stimuli: he spent several trillion in his first term on his “Investing in America” agenda.

But massive government spending spurred inflation and voters quickly began to resent the high cost of living. Biden took the historic step of pulling American troops out of Afghanistan in the summer of 2021 — thus ending a military intervention he had backed when it began more than two decades earlier.

A majority of U.S. citizens supported the decision to end “America’s longest war”, but the withdrawal proved shambolic.

The Afghan government, which America had spent so many billions propping up, promptly collapsed. Americans felt humiliated by scenes of U.S. aircraft scrambling to escape as Afghans clung to the wheels, desperate to escape the victorious Taliban.

By the end of August, the evacuation was complete — but Biden’s poll numbers took a sharp nosedive and never recovered. Biden’s Democrats performed better than expected in the 2022 “midterms”, keeping the Senate and only narrowly losing the House of Representatives.

Democrats hoped it might spur a comeback and see off the threat of Donald Trump’s return. no such luck. Fairly or not, his presidency will be forever remembered for the innumerable videos of him campaigning haplessly in 2024 — mumbling on stage or wandering aimlessly off.

It was a cruel end for the once impossibly young senator from Delaware, who came to office aged 29 promising to reinvigorate the American dream. Joe Biden had to become tough to overcome the many obstacles he faced in life.

His scrappiness came from his mother, Catherine Finnegan, a 5 ft 1 in Irish-American who imbued in her son a potent self-belief.

“Remember, Joey,” she told him.

“You’re a Biden. nobody is better than you. You’re not better than anybody, but nobody is better than you.”

Young Joe, the eldest of four, developed a bad stutter that would torment him for the rest of his life. at the Holy Rosary school in Claymont, Delaware, his classmates nicknamed him “Joe Impedimenta”.

Throughout his career, Joe would often quote Catherine’s Irish aphorisms in his speeches – “as my mother would say, ‘no purgatory for you, straight to Heaven!’ or ‘as my mother would say, hush up, boy!’.”

Biden is, in fact, an English name.

The Biden family appear to have emigrated to America from West Sussex in the early 19th century. yet for an aspiring Democratic politician in the 1970s, as Joe Biden was, playing up one’s Irishness – even sympathising with the IRA – was a vote-winner.

Plus, Biden always saw himself as representing the Irish underdog, the dignified working classes battling against injustice.

His father, Joseph Robinette Biden Sr had led quite a comfortable life cleaning boilers and selling cars in Scranton, Pennsylvania. But then business dried up and he found himself without a job.

“Big Joe” moved his young family to Wilmington, Delaware. Joe Jnr would later recall: “My dad always said, ‘Champ, the measure of a man is not how often he is knocked down, but how quickly he gets up.”

Biden also embraced his parents’ Catholicism, a source of strength that helped him overcome a series of appalling tragedies. He also took inspiration from the first Catholic president John F. Kennedy, another Irish-American.

In 1963, when JFK was assassinated, Biden was a student at the University of Delaware.

He was a talented athlete, tall and blue-eyed, but never distinguished himself as a scholar. He was, as he put it, “a little too interested in football and meeting new girls”.

In his junior year, on spring break, he flew to Nassau in the Bahamas, where he met Neilia Hunter, an English major at Syracuse University.

“I fell ass-over-tincup- in love,” he recalled.

By 1966, the pair had married. Biden went on to Syracuse’s law school, where he was caught lifting several pages from another paper without attribution and had to repeat a course.

He was, in his own words, “a dangerous combination of arrogant and sloppy”.

In 1972, aged only 29, he embarked on an audacious run to become the senator from Delaware. He started his campaign 30 points behind in the polls against J. Caleb Boggs, a 63-year-old liberal Republican. Again drawing on the example of JFK, Biden made a virtue of his youthfulness.

He campaigned all over the state with the beautiful Neilia and their three handsome children — Beau, Hunter and baby Naomi.

Come polling day on November 7, he pulled off one of the biggest upsets in U.S. Senate history, defeating Boggs by just 3,000 votes.

Then disaster struck.

On December 18, Joe had gone to Washington to interview staff as Neilia stayed in Delaware to do some shopping.

She was driving with all three children to buy a Christmas tree when her Chevy station wagon collided with a tractor-trailer.

Neilia and baby Naomi were pronounced dead on arrival at Wilmington General Hospital; Beau and Hunter suffered severe injuries.

“I felt God had played a horrible trick on me,” said Biden.

“There was no horizon.”

He contemplated suicide.

Biden took his oath in Wilmington Medical Center, with his son Beau lying in a hospital bed next to him.

As a single father, grieving widower and a new member of Congress, Biden took to commuting to and from Washington, a 90-minute train journey from Wilmington.

In spite of his pain, he quickly began carving out a name for himself on Capitol Hill.

He could charm Republicans as much as Democrats and became a popular member of the Washington dinner circuit.

In 1975, Biden noticed Jill Jacobs, a divorcee eight years his junior, on a billboard in a terminal at Wilmington Airport. She was the model for an advertising campaign for local parks.

By chance, in March that year, Biden’s brother Frank gave him Jill’s number with the recommendation: “You’ll like her, Joe. She doesn’t like politics.”

They married in 1977 in a United Nations chapel in New York.

He cruised to re-election as senator for Delaware and held the seat for another 32 years. A liberal voice on civil rights and healthcare, he specialised in occupying the new centre-ground of American politics by taking more conservative lines on social issues such as abortion.

In the 1970s, he appealed to anxious white voters by opposing desegregation busing – a controversial attempt to place more black children in predominately white schools.

In 1994, under the banner of being “tough on crime”, he made himself the driving force behind the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act – AKA “the Biden Crime Law” – which is often blamed for contributing to the mass incarceration of African- Americans.

In 1996, he supported the Defense of Marriage Act, which prohibited the federal recognition of same-sex unions. It’s hard to reconcile that man with the older Biden who “took the knee” in public before the Black Lives Matter movement.

As Commander-in-Chief, he appointed the first transgender admiral. Despite being a practising Catholic who prayed for decades with the rosary, he campaigned forcefully in favour of abortion rights.

Biden’s brother James and son Hunter made large sums selling at least the illusion of access to power through him. The extent to which Joe knew about or even cooperated with their schemes is a matter of debate.

Yet Biden found he could often rely on loyal journalists to shield the public from the grubbier aspects of his career. His staff often praised him for his empathy.

But others found his human touch somewhat overbearing. Some women complained about his handsiness.

Tragedy continued to strike the family.

In 1988, soon after his first failed presidential bid, he suffered two near-fatal brain aneurysms.

In 2015, Biden’s son Beau, 46, a distinguished military veteran and budding politician, died of brain cancer.

According to Joe, the dying Beau urged his father to seek the Democratic nomination once again ahead of the 2016 presidential election: “Dad, it’s who you are.”

In the end, however, Biden chose not to run, though that may have been down to Obama’s preference for Hillary Clinton as much as Biden’s debilitating grief.

Come 2020, Obama publicly supported Biden’s candidacy but the relationship between the two men was complicated. Obama had picked his vice-president in 2008 to shore up support among more traditional white Democrats but he found the older man’s haphazard style frustrating.

As a senator, listening to a long Biden speech in Congress, Obama once passed a note to a colleague.

“Shoot. Me. Now,” it said.

A Democratic source also recalled Obama saying: “Don’t underestimate Joe’s ability to f*** things up.”

Biden, for his part, initially saw the vice presidency as beneath him and bristled at the way he was treated by Obama’s team.

In office, however, the two men worked together successfully.

Biden would loyally defend the president on Capitol Hill, while Obama entrusted his “Veep” with difficult foreign policy matters. Biden regarded himself as an authority in international relations — despite his muddled record.

In the 1990s, he had voted against the first Gulf War, yet he pushed for more U.S. military aggression in the bombing of former Yugoslavia. He supported the invasion of Iraq in 2003, then turned into a critic of that war.

Concerns were raised about Biden’s handling of the Ukraine crisis, especially since son Hunter, a crack addict who had an affair with his late brother Beau’s widow, was on the board of the Ukrainian energy firm Burisma — on an extraordinary salary of $ 1million a year. Biden emerged from the Obama era with his “good-ol’ Joe” image intact.

After Trump’s shock victory in the 2016 election, many Democrats began to wish that Biden had been their candidate instead of Clinton.

Trump recognised the threat. He dispatched his adviser Rudy Giuliani, the former mayor of New York, to Eastern Europe on a mission to dig into rumours that Biden had demanded the firing of a Ukrainian prosecutor so as to protect Hunter.

Giuliani’s gambit backfired. He failed to prove any conspiracy and in 2019 a Democratic-led House of Representatives impeached Trump over his alleged attempt to extort the Ukrainian government for more dirt on Biden.

Moreover, the impeachment saga planted a clear notion in the minds of Democrats: Trump feared Biden.

He had to run.

It has been said that all political lives end in failure. Joe Biden was an exception to this rule in that he failed, repeatedly and spectacularly, throughout his career, yet still became the 46th President of the United States.

As such, his life serves as a testament to the indomitable American spirit: that drive always to recover from extraordinary setbacks, to keep bouncing off failure towards success and never to stop fighting.

Until, now that is, with his faculties so clearly failing him, even he accepted that he could not go on.