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Family background
Away from politics, Biden’s personal tragedies inevitably returned to the limelight as he ran for president.
On December 18, 1972, just weeks after he first won a Senate seat, Biden’s wife, Neilia, and their one-year-old daughter, Naomi, were killed in a car accident.
Neilia’s car collided with a tractor trailer while the family was out Christmas shopping. Biden’s children, Beau and Hunter, were seriously injured but survived the accident. Later, Biden remarried and had his daughter Ashley with his wife, Dr. Jill Biden, in 1981.
In August 2013, tragedy struck again when Beau, by then a politician to whom he himself spoke as a future aspiring president, was diagnosed with brain cancer. He passed away two years later.
In the first debate, Biden vigorously defended Trump’s attacks on his family, namely his son Hunter’s business and drug problems.
Later, Biden spoke with emotion about his son Beau, who died of cancer in 2015 after serving in Iraq. He attacked Trump for a report, denied by the president, that he had referred to the soldiers as “fools” and “losers.”
Trump said, “I don’t know Beau, I know Hunter.” The president later said Hunter was expelled from the military for drug use. Mr. Biden replied, “That’s not true. My son had a drug problem. He’s gotten over it and I’m proud of him.”
During that period, Biden continued his duties as vice president and shared emotional moments with Obama, the man who selected him as a running mate in 2008.
Hunter biden
Hunter Biden’s business was put at the forefront of the campaign agenda by the Trump team.
The Trump campaign claimed that Biden was involved in inappropriate business activity while he was vice president, which Biden denied.
The Trump campaign staged a headline-grabbing stunt moments before the second debate when a former Hunter business partner gave a seven-minute statement to the press outlining new accusations.
Trump brought up those claims on the stage of the debate in Nashville, Tennessee, calling Biden “corrupt.” His rival replied, “I have not taken a penny from any foreign source in my life.”
The president invited Tony Bobulinski, a former Hunter business associate, to the debate.
Bobulinski described how he and Hunter had tried to do business in China in 2017. “I heard Joe Biden say that he never discussed business with Hunter. That is false,” Bobulinski alleged at one point.
The statement included a series of accusations. Bobulinski said he was turning over devices to the FBI to back up his claims.
The move had echoes of a debate in the 2016 campaign when Trump rallied Bill Clinton’s accusers before taking on his wife and later Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton.
Biden insists, as he has throughout this year, that these stories are smears. He also called Rudy Giuliani, the former New York mayor and Trump ally who has pushed the claims, a “Russian pawn.”
Biden went on the attack in the second debate by bringing up Trump’s Chinese bank account, which recently came to light via The New York Times. Trump said it had closed and responded: “I don’t make money from China. You do. I don’t make money with Ukraine. You do. I don’t make money from Russia. “Biden denied it.
Read more: How it happened: step-by-step account of the second presidential debate of Donald Trump and Joe Biden
Tensions with Obama
Biden recalls in Promise me dad, his book on those years, how Obama once shed tears for his son and offered to personally pay for treatment if money was lacking.
The couple’s relationship, the most significant of Biden’s political career, was so close in public that their “bromance” became a family joke before leaving office.