Joe Biden: Every Wound Became an Offering — Until the Last One

"I am the President, but I am also a Dad."

At 11:40 on the morning of January 20, 2025, Joe Biden sat alone in the Oval Office with a pen in his hand and twenty minutes left as president of the United States. The documents on the desk were preemptive pardons — for his brothers James and Frank, his sister Valerie, and their spouses. No charges had been filed against any of them. No president in American history had ever done anything like it.

He signed them. Then he stood up and walked out of the building for the last time.

Three weeks earlier, he'd already signed the broadest presidential pardon since Gerald Ford pardoned Nixon — for his son Hunter, covering any federal offense committed over the previous decade. He had promised, publicly, repeatedly, categorically, that he would never do this. His press secretary had said "It's still a no. It will be a no. It is a no." PolitiFact rated the reversal a "Full Flop."

The most institutionalist president in a generation had broken the institution. In his final minutes, he finished what he'd started.

His explanation was a sentence that cracked open fifty years of carefully maintained composure:

"In trying to break Hunter, they've tried to break me — and there's no reason to believe it will stop here. Enough is enough."

To understand that moment — to understand how the Senate's greatest bridge-builder used his final act to build a wall around his family — you have to understand Enneagram Type 2 psychology. The Helper. The person whose deepest need is to be needed, whose identity is built on absorbing other people's pain, and whose boundaries dissolve completely when the people they love are in danger.

Biden's five decades in public life aren't the story of a career politician climbing a ladder. They're the story of a man who turned every private wound into a public offering — until the last wound was too close, and the offering became a shield.

TL;DR: Why Joe Biden is an Enneagram Type 2

• Grief as Public Service: After losing his wife and daughter in 1972, Biden was sworn in at his sons' hospital bedside and commuted 4 hours daily for 36 years to be home every night. Every tragedy became a tool for connecting with others' pain.
• The Broken Promise: He swore he would never pardon Hunter. Then he did — with the broadest scope since Ford pardoned Nixon. "In trying to break Hunter, they've tried to break me." The father whose boundaries dissolved for family.
• The 2w1 Engine: Catholic moral framework + compulsive helping. The rosary in his pocket every day since Beau died. The Violence Against Women Act. The Cancer Moonshot. Principled protection is the 2w1 signature.
• The Hidden Edge: Something happens to Biden when the people he loves are under threat. The warmest man in the room becomes the most dangerous one. His staff learned this. His political enemies learned it last.

The Boy With the Flashlight

Before the presidency, before the Senate, before the tragedies, there was a boy in Scranton who couldn't say his own name without stumbling.

Joe Biden's stutter was severe enough that a nun — his own teacher — mocked him in front of the class. "Mr. Buh-buh-buh Biden," she called him as he tried to recite an assignment. His sister Valerie remembers the moment. His mother, Jean, marched back into the school and told the nun: "If you ever, ever, ever do that again, I'm going to come back and I'm going to knock your bonnet right off your head."

A mother who would fight for her son. A son who would spend the rest of his life fighting for everyone else.

Biden's parents sent him to a speech pathologist. It didn't help. He quit. Then he waged a private war on his stutter alone in his bedroom — holding a flashlight to his face in front of the mirror, reciting Yeats and Emerson for hours, focusing on rhythm and cadence, using poetry as a workaround for the sounds his mouth refused to make. No audience. No praise. Just a boy in a dark room teaching himself to speak.

What the stutter planted in him went deeper than a speech impediment. Journalist Jeanne Marie Laskas, who profiled Biden for GQ, told PBS Frontline: "So much of who he is comes back to that — that people are ready to make fun of him. That people will laugh." The implication of mocking a stutterer, she said, was that "you're thought of as stupid or maybe lazy." Biden later told a CNN town hall: "Stuttering is the only handicap that people still laugh about. That still humiliate people about."

A boy who was mocked as stupid. A man who would spend the next fifty years proving he wasn't — not through achievement, but through showing up for other people's pain. The shame of the stutter didn't disappear when the stutter improved. It just found a new outlet.

The proudest moment of his youth was delivering a five-minute speech as a high school senior without stuttering once. The kid who'd been ridiculed became class president.

Decades later, in February 2020, a 13-year-old boy named Brayden Harrington met Biden backstage at a CNN town hall. Brayden stuttered. Biden pulled him aside, showed him the technique he still used — marking up speech pages to make them easier to deliver — and gave him his personal phone number. "It has nothing to do with your intelligence quotient," he told him. "It has nothing to do with your intellectual makeup."

Six months later, Brayden delivered one of the most memorable speeches at the Democratic National Convention — a 13-year-old standing at the podium, stuttering through his words, and bringing the audience to tears.

That's the Type 2 pattern in miniature: transform your own wound into a tool for healing someone else's. Biden didn't just overcome his stutter. He turned it into a gift he could pass to someone who needed it more.

December 18, 1972

Biden was twenty-nine years old, the youngest senator-elect in the country, interviewing staff in Washington when his brother Jimmy called.

His wife Neilia and their 13-month-old daughter Naomi had been killed when a tractor-trailer struck their station wagon at an intersection in Hockessin, Delaware. They'd been out Christmas shopping. His sons Beau, three, and Hunter, two, survived with serious injuries — Beau with a broken leg, Hunter with a fractured skull.

Biden wrote later that he "could not speak, only felt this hollow core grow in my chest, like I was going to be sucked inside a black hole."

He considered not taking office. He considered worse. In his memoir Promises to Keep, he wrote with unusual candor: "I began to understand how despair led people to just cash it in; how suicide wasn't just an option but a rational option... I felt God had played a horrible trick on me."

What pulled him back was simple. His sister Valerie said it plainly: "They had lost their mom and their sister, so they cannot lose their father, and that's what made him get out of bed in the morning."

He survived because he was needed. Remember that. It's the origin of everything that follows.

On January 5, 1973, he was sworn in as a United States senator at his sons' hospital bedside. Beau and Hunter lay in their beds nearby. Biden took the oath standing between them.

Then he did something that would define the next thirty-six years of his life. He started commuting.

Every day. Four hours round trip. Wilmington to Washington on the Amtrak, so he could be home to put his boys to bed every night and see them every morning. He made over 8,200 round trips across 36 years. He knew the conductors by name. He attended their funerals. He threw them Christmas parties. Amtrak renamed the Wilmington station after him. He later said Amtrak had "provided me another family entirely."

A Type 3 — the Achiever — would have moved to Washington and hired a nanny. The career demanded it. But Biden wasn't optimizing for career. He was optimizing for presence. For being needed by the two people who needed him most.

Three years later, his brother Frank set him up on a blind date with Jill Jacobs. She showed up expecting jeans and clogs; he arrived in a sport coat and loafers. She thought: "God, this is never going to work." He proposed five times before she said yes.

Her reason for finally agreeing had nothing to do with politics: "I had fallen in love with the boys, and I really felt that this marriage had to work. Because they had lost their mom, and I couldn't have them lose another mother."

The man who survived by being needed found his match — and something more. Jill didn't just marry Joe. She became Beau and Hunter's mother. According to Biden's memoir, the boys gradually stopped calling her "Jill" and started calling her "Mom" on their own — nobody asked them to. If an interviewer ever referred to her as their "stepmother," Beau or Hunter would correct them on the spot. In his own addiction memoir, Beautiful Things, Hunter calls her simply "my mother."

Jill later described her role in the family with a single question: "How do you make a broken family whole?" The answer, for her, was the same as it was for Joe: you show up, every single day, until the cracks close.

What made their partnership unusual wasn't that both were caregivers. It was that Jill matched Joe's intensity with a harder edge. Where Joe's instinct was to connect with everyone, Jill's was to protect the inner circle. White House staff learned quickly that loyalty was the currency in Biden's orbit, and Jill was the one who audited the books. Her top aide would ask incoming staffers a single question: "Are you a Biden person?" Those who couldn't answer convincingly didn't last. The man who opened himself to everyone married the woman who guarded the door.

The proof came in 1988, when Biden suffered two near-fatal brain aneurysms at Walter Reed. His mother, sister, and brothers debated the best path forward for his treatment. Jill interrupted: "Wait a minute! He's my husband. I should be making the decision here." The room went silent. Then Joe's mother, Jean, settled it: "She's right." Jill later said that was the moment she felt she had "become a full-fledged Biden."

In 2003, senior Democrats came to the Biden home to pressure Joe into running against George W. Bush. The Bidens had already decided against it. Jill, furious at the intrusion, grabbed a Sharpie, wrote "No" across her stomach, and marched through the strategy session in her bikini. The room got the message.

In February 2020, a heckler charged toward Joe at a New Hampshire campaign event. Jill leaped from her chair and physically blocked the protester from reaching her husband. Reporters asked about it. She laughed: "I'm a good Philly girl." A month later, two more protesters rushed the stage on Super Tuesday. Jill blocked them too.

She wrote in her memoir Where the Light Enters: "As a political spouse, I've found that my stoicism often serves me well." But stoicism undersells it. NBC News called her "the single most important voice" in Biden's major decisions, "wielding unparalleled influence across the White House in a manner that defies easy comparison with past presidential spouses." By the end, she was the gatekeeper, the guardian, and the last line of defense. The man who'd survived 1972 because his sons needed him now had someone whose entire purpose was making sure the world didn't consume him.

The Need to Be Needed

At the core of Enneagram Type 2 is a simple equation: I am worthy of love when I am useful to your pain.

Type 2s scan every room for need. They move toward suffering the way some people move toward the buffet. They measure their worth not in what they've achieved but in who they've helped. At their best, they make people feel profoundly seen. At their worst, they erase their own needs entirely, then resent the world for not noticing.

Biden doesn't just exhibit these traits. He organized his entire political career around them.

Campaign staffers spent decades trying to keep him on schedule. He'd linger with voters long past the cutoff, listening to their stories, offering his phone number, calling them weeks later to check in. Former Obama advisor David Axelrod put it simply: "His superpower is empathy. That's not something you can fake."

A former aide described his memory: "He remembers everyone's story. Not just their name, but what they're going through, what matters to them. It's like he keeps a mental rolodex of people he cares about — and that's basically everyone he's ever met."

That's not a political talent. That's a cognitive orientation. A mind wired to prioritize relational data over every other kind.

But underneath the warmth is the engine that powers it — and that engine runs on shame.

Picture him before a press conference. Staff has prepped him for hours — briefing books drilled, answers rehearsed until airtight. He walks out and talks for forty-five minutes past the cutoff anyway, rambling, circling back, making sure no question goes unanswered. The preparation isn't about performing well. It's insurance against being caught not knowing something. Against someone in the room thinking what the nun said out loud sixty years ago: this man is stupid. That's what shame looks like when it runs a life — not a feeling Biden discusses, but a current underneath every room he enters. I am not worthy of love unless I earn it. And the earning never stops.

Franklin Foer, whose book The Last Politician drew on extensive White House access, told PBS Frontline: "You can't understand Joe Biden without understanding the insecurities at the core of his being." Those insecurities, Foer said, were "born out of the stutter, born out of the bullying" — and they became "the diesel fuel that keeps pushing him forward." The internal voice Foer described was blunt: "Goddamn it, I am smart. Goddamn it, I am a great man in history."

The boy who couldn't say his own name became the senator who talked longer than anyone else in every hearing. The father who nearly died of grief became the politician who told a crowd at Grinnell College in 2019: "It gives me some sense of purpose when I'm able to be of some help."

Some sense of purpose. Not satisfaction. Not pride. Purpose. The word a man uses when the alternative is the black hole he described in 1972 — the one that opens in your chest and threatens to swallow you whole.

Biden's shadow showed up most clearly behind closed doors.

The Rosary and the Rule Book

Biden is a Type 2 with a One wing — the moral backbone that distinguishes principled caretaking from people-pleasing charm.

The evidence is his Catholicism. Not the Sunday-morning, camera-friendly kind. The structural kind.

Biden has attended Mass nearly every weekend of his adult life — at Holy Trinity in Georgetown when in Washington, at St. Joseph on the Brandywine in Wilmington when home. His first wife, his daughter, and his son Beau are all buried at St. Joseph's. On Election Day 2020, before the results came in, the first thing Biden did was attend Mass at the church where his family is buried.

Since Beau's death in 2015, Biden has worn Beau's rosary beads every single day. "I have not taken off the rosary Beau was wearing when he passed," he told Megyn Kelly. "It is my connection with him." He later told CNN: "Got it in my pocket... I keep it all the time. It makes me feel good. I know he's with me, just touching it."

The rosary isn't a political prop. It's a private anchor. A man reaching into his pocket a hundred times a day to touch the beads his dying son held.

The 2w1 pattern also explains Biden's legislative signature. The Violence Against Women Act wasn't born from polling. Biden spent years visiting women's shelters, listening to survivors, getting close to the human story before writing the rules. The Cancer Moonshot wasn't policy strategy — it was transformed grief, Beau's death converted into a federal crusade. Catholic social teaching — dignity for all, protection of the vulnerable — isn't just Biden's political framework. It's his moral framework. The One wing provides the principle. The Two provides the need to act on it.

Senator Ted Kaufman, Biden's closest political ally for decades, captured both sides: "Joe has this unique ability to disagree with you without being disagreeable... Sometimes he'll bend too far to find common ground."

The gift and the trap in one sentence. The man who knows right from wrong — but whose need for connection can override even his own principles.

What Biden Is Like Behind Closed Doors

The public Biden is avuncular, empathetic, sometimes bumbling. The private Biden is more complicated than either supporters or detractors will admit.

The temper. According to Axios, Biden has a quick-trigger rage that some aides manage by never meeting with him alone. "Some take a colleague, almost as a shield against a solo blast." His admonitions include: "God dammit, how the f**k don't you know this?!" and "Don't f**king bullsh*t me!" One administration official said flatly: "No one is safe." He grills aides until it's clear they don't know the answer — a routine some call "stump the chump." Former Senate aide Jeff Connaughton — who later wrote a book-length critique of Biden — described him as an "egomaniacal autocrat... determined to manage his staff through fear." The characterization is harsh, and the source had his own grievances, but the pattern Connaughton describes tracks with what other aides report more diplomatically.

The warmth. In November 2014, Biden sent a memo to his entire staff saying he did not expect or want anyone to miss family obligations for work — birthdays, anniversaries, graduations, religious ceremonies. "If I find out you are working while missing important family responsibilities," he wrote, "it would disappoint me greatly." The memo was forged by the 1972 tragedy.

The rituals. Biden works out every morning with weights while watching the news. He and Jill negotiate who gets the Peloton first. He carries a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and a protein bar in his briefcase. His favorite ice cream is chocolate chip. He once told a crowd: "My name is Joe Biden and I love ice cream. I eat more ice cream than three other people you'd like to be with, all at once." He buys Jill flowers every week.

The nightly call. Every single night, without exception, Biden ends his day with a phone call to Hunter. Every night. Through the addiction, the scandals, the trial, the pardon. The call happens.

That detail — the nightly call — is the one you need if you want to understand the pardons.

"No One F**ks With a Biden"

Enneagram theory maps what happens when each type is under stress. For Type 2, the stress arrow points to Type 8 — the Challenger. The caretaker becomes combative. The person who normally absorbs other people's pain starts throwing punches.

Biden's public record is littered with these moments.

September 29, 2020. First presidential debate. Trump interrupts relentlessly. Biden turns to him: "Will you shut up, man." Then: "Keep yapping, man." Then he calls Trump a "clown." The Biden campaign sold merchandise featuring the quote within hours.

October 5, 2022. Biden visits Fort Myers, Florida, to survey Hurricane Ian damage. A hot microphone catches him telling the mayor: "No one f**ks with a Biden." The mayor shrugged it off: "It was just two guys talking."

February 9, 2020. A college student in New Hampshire asks about his Iowa performance. He calls her a "lying dog-faced pony soldier" — a phrase he attributes to John Wayne, though researchers have never found it in any Wayne film.

In isolation, these read as gaffes. Through the Enneagram, they read as a pattern: a man who, when pushed past his threshold, flips into the Eight's raw combativeness. The whisper-in-public, scream-in-private contradiction isn't hypocrisy. It's the 2→8 stress arrow playing out in real time.

And the pardons? The pardons are the biggest stress-arrow moment of Biden's entire life. "In trying to break Hunter, they've tried to break me." That's not a calculated political statement. That's a father who flipped: you came for my family, and now I will use every power I have to stop you.

"Promise Me, Dad"

Beau Biden died of brain cancer on May 30, 2015, at Walter Reed. He was 46.

It was Biden's second catastrophic loss. The first had nearly destroyed him. The second came while he was vice president, while the country was watching, while the question of whether he would run for president hung over everything.

The book Biden wrote about that year is called Promise Me, Dad. The title comes from Beau's deathbed request: "Promise me, Dad. Give me your word that no matter what happens, you're going to be all right."

A dying son asking his father to survive. The same father who, forty-three years earlier, had contemplated suicide after losing his first wife and daughter.

Biden chose not to run in 2016. He announced it in the Rose Garden on October 21, 2015, with Obama beside him: "The process, by the time we get through it, closes the window on mounting a realistic campaign for president."

The decision was more complicated than grief alone. Obama had privately discouraged Biden from running — gently pressing him over several weeks and sending his top strategists to deliver discouraging assessments of Biden's odds against Hillary Clinton. Biden later said simply: "The president was not encouraging."

For a Type 2, that's not a political calculation. It's a relational wound — the deepest kind a Two can suffer. Biden had spent eight years as Obama's loyal number two — absorbing slights, deferring his own ambitions, showing up every day. And when he needed support in return, the person he'd served told him to stand down. According to Steven Levingston's book Barack and Joe, Obama viewed Biden as "just another white guy, one in a long line of American presidents" — hardly the symbol of change Obama wanted his legacy to be. Obama had placed his bet on Hillary Clinton.

You are not needed here. That's the sentence that breaks a Type 2.

In January 2016, Biden admitted publicly: "I regret it every day, but it was the right decision for my family and for me." A year later, with less diplomacy, he told a private audience: "I never thought she was a great candidate. I thought I was a great candidate."

When Trump beat Clinton, Biden reportedly felt guilty for not running and furious at the people who'd pushed him not to. A former aide put it bluntly: "You don't get to do that more than once." Meaning: the party only gets to sideline Biden once before he stops listening. Remember that line. It explains everything about 2024.

The Cancer Moonshot followed. Biden channeled Beau's death into a federal initiative to accelerate cancer research — the Beau Biden Cancer Moonshot, which funded 250 research projects and set a goal of cutting cancer death rates in half. "I give you my word as a Biden," he said. "This Cancer Moonshot is one of the reasons why I ran for President." Private pain, converted into public crusade. Again.

Then, on May 18, 2025, Biden's office announced that he had been diagnosed with aggressive prostate cancer. Gleason 9 — on a scale that tops out at 10. The cancer had already metastasized to his bones. Only about 7% of prostate cancer patients present at that stage. Five-year survival rates hover around 30%. A University of Pittsburgh urologist told NPR that Biden had "a very bad version of it, probably the worst version you can get."

The timing was almost literary. The diagnosis came twelve days before the tenth anniversary of Beau's death. The man who had channeled his son's cancer into a federal crusade now had one of the most aggressive forms of the disease himself. Barack Obama's statement cut to the irony: "Nobody has done more to find breakthrough treatments for cancer in all its forms than Joe."

His first public remarks came on May 30, 2025 — the anniversary itself — at Veterans Memorial Park in New Castle, Delaware. He could have held a press conference. He could have scripted a video. Instead, he chose to stand among grieving military families — other people's pain, the place he has always been most comfortable — and speak about his own.

"This day is the 10th anniversary of the loss of my son Beau, who spent a year in Iraq. And to be honest, it's a hard day."

Then, about his prognosis: "We're going to be able to beat this."

On social media, he posted a selfie with Jill and their cat and wrote: "Cancer touches us all. Like so many of you, Jill and I have learned that we are strongest in the broken places." The line is Hemingway — A Farewell to Arms — and Biden has reached for it at every crisis point in his life: after Beau's death, during COVID, now facing his own mortality. The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places.

He started hormone therapy. In October, he completed five weeks of radiation at Penn Medicine in Philadelphia. His daughter Ashley shared a video of him ringing the bell — the traditional cancer milestone marker — and posted on Instagram: "Dad has been so damn brave throughout his treatment. Grateful."

The same ritual he'd watched countless patients perform. Now performed by the man who'd built the Moonshot in his dead son's name. Standing in the cancer ward of a hospital, holding Jill's hand, ringing a bell for himself.

This is the moment where Type 2 growth toward Type 4 becomes visible. The integration direction for a Two is toward authenticity — toward feeling their own pain rather than only channeling it into service for others. Biden at that bell wasn't converting grief into policy. He wasn't comforting someone else. For once, the pain was his own, and he was letting himself feel it — publicly, without armor, without converting it into purpose for someone else. The boy who held a flashlight to his own face in a dark room, sixty years later, standing in a hospital letting people see him as a patient instead of a president.

The Exit Nobody Wanted — Including Him

June 27, 2024. Atlanta. The first presidential debate.

Biden had requested the format — muted mics, no audience — believing it would neutralize Trump's tactics. Instead, it exposed him. He was halting, confused, barely audible. At one point he trailed off: "We finally beat Medicare." Trump: "He beat Medicare. He beat it to death."

The New York Times editorial board published their verdict the next day: "To Serve His Country, President Biden Should Leave the Race."

NBC News reported what happened behind the scenes. Biden was "humiliated, devoid of confidence and painfully aware that the physical images of him at the debate — eyes staring into the distance, mouth agape — will live beyond his presidency." The question facing him, NBC reported, was whether he could "get to a place inside himself where he moved past the humiliation of the debate to have the confidence to get back in the ring."

For the boy who was mocked as stupid by a nun. For the man Franklin Foer described as carrying "an array of insecurities, status anxieties" — the debate was the stutter happening on national television all over again.

His public reaction was defiance. He told aides it was "a bad night." Jill reinforced it on the debate stage itself: "Joe, you did such a great job! You answered every question, you knew all the facts!" Two days later, at a fundraiser on Long Island, she declared: "Joe isn't just the right person for the job. He's the only person for the job."

Then came Camp David. The Biden family — Jill, Hunter, the grandchildren — had already been scheduled for an Annie Leibovitz photo shoot that weekend. It became something else: a war council. Jill and Hunter were reportedly the most vocal advocates for staying in. The family discussed whether top advisers should be fired for the debate preparation failures. Jill told Vogue — for an already-in-production August cover that critics would later call "tone deaf" — "We will not let those 90 minutes define the four years he's been president. We will continue to fight."

The guardian was doing what the guardian does: closing ranks around the family.

What followed was the most intense intra-party pressure campaign in modern political history. Nancy Pelosi told Biden privately that polls showed he couldn't win. Obama went quiet — his silence the loudest message. Major donors threatened to redirect funds to down-ballot races. More than 30 Democratic members of Congress called for him to step aside.

The man who survived by being needed was being told he wasn't.

On July 21, 2024, isolating at Rehoboth Beach with COVID, Biden posted his withdrawal:

"While it has been my intention to seek reelection, I believe it is in the best interest of my party and the country for me to stand down."

Three days later, from the Oval Office: "I revere this office, but I love my country more." Then: "Nothing, nothing can come in the way of saving our democracy. That includes personal ambition."

The words were a Type 2 at their healthiest — my needs do not matter if someone else's are greater. But a longtime Biden ally told NBC what was really happening underneath: "Here is a man who has always talked about dignity. And what was happening to him in a very public setting was undignified. Where does the president go to get his dignity back?"

The anger leaked. Biden reportedly told associates about Pelosi: "She had a lot to do with this." He still told aides he believed he could have beaten Trump. NBC reported that the Biden family was "distraught and moving through stages of anger and grief over how people they perceived to be friends treated the president."

It was 2016 all over again — the party's leaders telling him his time was up, the loyalty he'd given for decades unreturned when it mattered most. Except this time, he'd already learned the lesson his aide had articulated: you don't get to do that more than once. The fact that they did it twice made the wound permanent.

And then one more detail, the one that reveals the Two beneath the fury. When Biden endorsed Kamala Harris, a Biden ally explained the reasoning to NBC: "There are some people who don't want her. The president understands how that feels, which is why he did the loyal thing." Even in betrayal, he reached for someone else's pain. Even discarded, he tried to shield another person from the thing that was destroying him.

The father stepped aside. The fighter never forgave.

"Enough Is Enough"

Now we're back to where we started.

Biden had promised — repeatedly, across six months, through three different spokespeople — that he would not pardon his son Hunter. Every time: No. It will be a no. It is a no.

Hunter had been convicted on three felony gun charges in Delaware — lying about drug use on a firearms purchase form while in the grip of crack cocaine addiction. He'd pled guilty to nine tax counts in California. Maximum combined sentence: 42 years.

On December 1, 2024, Biden signed the pardon. It was the broadest presidential pardon since Gerald Ford pardoned Nixon — covering any offense Hunter may have committed from January 1, 2014, through December 1, 2024. A ten-year blanket. No president in American history had ever pardoned their own child.

His statement:

"No reasonable person who looks at the facts of Hunter's cases can reach any other conclusion than Hunter was singled out only because he is my son — and that is wrong."

And then:

"In trying to break Hunter, they've tried to break me — and there's no reason to believe it will stop here. Enough is enough."

Senator Michael Bennet, a Democrat, said Biden "put personal interest ahead of duty." Governor Jared Polis said Biden "put his family ahead of the country."

They were right. And that's the point.

A Type 3 president would have calculated the political cost. A Type 1 would have held to the principle. A Type 5 would have found a structural workaround. A Type 2, when the people he loves are under threat, does the thing the other types can't fathom: dissolves the boundary between personal and institutional, and protects the family at any cost.

Nineteen days later, with twenty minutes left in his presidency, Biden signed preemptive pardons for his brothers, his sister, and their spouses. None of them had been charged. His statement returned to the same thesis: "My family has been subjected to unrelenting attacks and threats, motivated solely by a desire to hurt me."

The text message to Hunter from 2018 — recovered from Hunter's laptop, later introduced as evidence at his trial — is the detail that makes the whole analysis click. It reads:

"You've always made me proud. You got the disease from mommy and me but you are strong and courageous with so much more to give."

You got the disease from mommy and me.

A father absorbing his son's addiction as his own failure. That's the Type 2 core laid bare: I will take your pain. I will make it mine. I will carry it for you even when carrying it costs me everything I've built.

Why Not a Type 3?

The obvious objection: Biden ran for president three times. He spent fifty years in politics. He clearly wanted to win. Isn't that a Type 3?

The gaffes prove otherwise.

A Type 3 — the Achiever — would have fixed the gaffes decades ago. The stammering, the oversharing, the wandering off-script — a Three cannot tolerate a failed performance. They sand down every rough edge until the surface gleams.

Biden never could. Because the gaffes and the empathy come from the same source: an unfiltered emotional responsiveness that prioritizes connection over performance. He lingers with voters because he genuinely cannot leave a person in pain. He tells the Amtrak conductor story for the eighth time — even after fact-checkers debunk the details — because the relationship matters more to him than the accuracy.

A Type 3's adaptation is strategic: become what the room needs to succeed.

A Type 2's adaptation is relational: become what the person in front of me needs to feel loved.

Biden has always been the second. The career was the vehicle. Connection was the fuel.

The Rosary in His Pocket

Joe Biden's story is the story of a man who built a career on turning wounds into connections.

The stutter became a gift to Brayden Harrington. The 1972 accident became the reason he sat with every grieving family for fifty years. Beau's death became the Cancer Moonshot. The debate disaster became the withdrawal he framed — genuinely or not — as sacrifice. Every wound became a bridge to someone else's pain.

But the pardons don't fit the pattern. The pardons aren't a bridge to anyone. They're a wall. A father standing between his family and the world with every power the presidency affords, twenty minutes before the power disappears forever.

"I am the President," he said after Hunter's conviction. "But I am also a Dad."

He chose Dad.

Every night, the phone rings. Hunter picks up. The call happens. It has always happened — through the crack pipes and the courtrooms and the pardons and the political wreckage. He touches the rosary in his pocket and does the only thing he has ever known how to do.

He shows up.

Disclaimer This analysis of Joe Biden's Enneagram type is speculative, based on publicly available information, and may not reflect the actual personality type of President Biden.