You can listen to the front on your smart sneaker every morning to hear the latest episode. Just say play the news from the Australian. From the Australian, I'm Claire Harvey. It's Monday, July twenty two. Joe Biden has finally announced the news an increasingly panicky Democratic Party has been hoping for. He will step aside from his candidacy for the twenty
twenty four presidential election. Now the Democrats must choose a new candidate, with Vice President Kamala Harris likely dick and test the nomination with rivals including state governors Gretchen Whitmer and Gavin Newsom. In a statement released early on Monday morning Australian Time, Biden heralded his administration's achievements, including in healthcare,
climate action, and the treatment of veterans. Biden wrote, it has been the greatest honor of my life to serve as your president, and while it has been my intention to seek reelection, I believe it is in the best interests of my party and the country for me to stand down and to focus solely on my duties as president for the remainder of my term. The president continued, I believe today what I always have, that there is
nothing America can't do when we do it together. We just have to remember we are the United States of America. Biden said he would address the nation later this week. The very Ladest News is live right now at the Australian dot com au. But today on the front we're revisiting the remarkable drama, tragedy and triumph in the life of Joseph Robinette Biden Junior, the forty sixth President of
the United States. It's the end of the political road on his terms for a man whose political career has stretched over five decades and taken him from Scranton, Pennsylvania to the White House. For a long time, Joe Biden was considered too young.
The boys looking father of three young children, was celebrating his thirtieth birthdays. That makes him just old enough to be a United States Senator, thirty being the minimum age prescride by the Constitution in Washington. To date, he was having trouble convincing some people he really is a senator and having some doubts.
About Joe Biden was a twenty nine year old lawyer when he became one of the youngest Americans to ever be elected to the US Senate in nineteen seventy two. His political experience before that was a couple of years on the local council in his new home state of Delaware, and being junior and senior class president at high school. He was charming and smooth, but he had not always
been confident. Joe Biden grew up with a stutter. He was ridiculed for the speech impediment by his teachers and peers, but Biden credits that stutter with shaping his fortune.
I learned so much from having to deal with stuttering. It gave me insight into other people's pain, other people suffered. It made me understand that everyone everyone has something they're fighting to overcome.
Biden's political career stretched fifty two years. During that time, he endured shattering personal tragedy. Shortly after Joe Biden turned thirty, his wife and children were involved in a car crash while Christmas shopping. This is Biden talking about that moment some forty years later.
My wife was.
Dead, my daughter was dead, and I wasn't sure how my sons were going to make it. For the first time in my life, I understood how someone could consciously decide to commit suicide, not because they were deranged, not because they were notts because they've been at the top of the mountain and they just knew in their heart they never get there again.
Biden suddenly found himself a single father to his young sons, Bo and Hunter. The grief was immense, but Biden's political career did not slow down. He was elected to the Senate seven consecutive times. He ran for the Democratic presidential nomination in nineteen eighty eight and again in two thousand and eight, before becoming Vice president under Barack Obama. In twenty fifteen, tragedy struck the Biden family again.
Believing the political world Tonight is mourning the death of Bo Biden, the son of Vice President Joe Biden, who succumbed to brain cancer Saturday at the age of forty six. He was a promising young politician, but his death highlights both the dangers of brain cancer and the tragedies that too often have befallen the Biden family.
Joe Biden now had only one living child from his first marriage, Hunter Biden, a son whom he loved but who would become an enormous political liability.
Guilty on all counts. That is the verdict in the gun trial of Hunter Biden, the President's son. Hunter Biden is now convicted of all three felony charges related to the purchase of a revolver in twenty eighteen while being an addict.
Scandal after scandal finally culminated in June twenty twenty four, Hunter Biden was convicted for lying about his illegal drug use in order to buy a gun some years earlier. He was the first child of a sitting US president to be convicted of a crime. But despite Hunter Biden's many controversies and concerns about Joe Biden's age, in twenty twenty, Joe became the President of the United States after winning
a bitter campaign against Donald Trump. In his twenty twenty victory speech, Biden sounds, even at seventy seven, relatively youthful and dynamic.
I'm proud of the coalestion. We put together the broadest and most diverse coalation in history. Democrats, Republicans, Independents, progress as, moderates, Conservatives, young, old, urban, suburban, rural, gay, straight, transgender, weight, Latino, Asian, Native American.
I mean it, especially those moments, and.
Especially those moments with his campaign was that lowest down the African American community stood up again for Amay bad and I have your.
As a politician, Biden can be difficult to ideologically pin down. In a nineteen seventy four profile, Biden rejected the idea he was a progressive liberal. We've used an ai voice to read his words from nineteen seventy four.
When it comes to issues like abortion, amnesty, and acid, I'm about as liberal as your grandmother.
On the topic of abortion, Biden was particularly vehement. The Supreme Court's landmark Roe versus Wade decision had been announced just the year before. Biden, who's a Catholic, did not agree with the finding.
I don't like the Supreme Court decision on abortion. I think it went too far. I don't think that a woman has the soul right to say what should happen to her body.
The accepted wisdom is that people become more conservative as they age. In Biden's case, the opposite appears to be true. Biden said in his twenty twenty presidential campaign he would look to decriminalize marijuana at a federal level. He also said people should not be behind bars on charges of simple possession or small scale use. While marijuana was not decriminalized in his term, there have been at least two rounds of mass pardons for people with federal possession convictions.
But it's the politically divisive topic of abortion on which Biden has softened the most.
At you, a few of the American people, send me at Congress of supports the right to choose. I promise you, I'll restore Roby Wade as the law of the land again.
Reproductive rights were at the center of Biden's twenty twenty four re election campaign. He positioned himself as the only man standing between women and nationwide abortion bands. So where did it go wrong for Joe Biden? Up next his decline in popularity and questions on his mental acuity. We'll be back after this break. When Joe Biden took office in twenty twenty one, he faced an immense task.
Today we celebrate the triumph not of a candidate, but of a cause, the cause of democracy.
Biden positioned himself as a unifier. Former President Trump called the election stolen. When Biden came to office, COVID was still raging and the economic situation was dire mass layoffs meant to unemployed omen was at six point three percent, and food banks were feeding millions.
San Antonio Food Bank in Texas. The food bank serves eight semi truck loads of food to people in need every day. They say the numbers are so high they have to ration food.
Biden signed a one point nine trillion dollar stimulus package in March twenty twenty one, and the first twinges of inflation were felt worldwide. A few months later, for the first time, Biden's popularity took a serious hit. His popularity was tested again when he withdrew troops from Afghanistan in August twenty twenty one. The Taliban took over almost immediately as people scrambled to evacuate. A bomb at Kabul Airport killed thirteen American troops and nearly two hundred Afghans. Many
said this was an avoidable tragedy. Biden's popularity might have had time to recover had there not been more economic strain to come. In February twenty twenty two, Russia invaded Ukraine and the costs of energy and shipping went up. By June, prices in America had increased by more than nine percent, the steepest rise in four decades. Economists predicted a recession, and it didn't eventuate for America, but the cost of living pressures continued to hit, but more than
the economy and more than the withdrawal of troops. It was this moment which derailed Biden's re election campaign.
When I'm in to fix the taxis, for example, we had one thousand tillionaires in America, but a billionaires ann and what's happening.
The first presidential debate, Biden gave a performance so disastrous it may be the only thing some Americans remember.
About him, dealing with everything we have to do with.
Look if we finally beat medicare.
Thank you, President Biden.
President Trump, he's ready.
He did beat Medicare, he beat it to death, and he's destroying Medicare because all of these people are coming in.
The reaction was swift and severe. This was Democrat's worst nightmare.
Just a day for mister Biden's to beat performance sparks concerns about his age.
Donald Trump emerged as the winner of the debate, where he was saying more nimble and disciplined compared to twenty twenty.
This cannot be real.
Life.
It just can't where America god.
Biden compounded his mistake by introducing Ukrainian President Voladimir Zelenski as President Putin.
And now I want to hand it over to the President of Ukraine, who has as much courage as he has determination, Ladies and gentlemen, President Putin, President prudent. He's got beat President Pusin. President Lynskin. I'm so focused on beating Putin. We gotta worry about it anyway.
He then referred to Kamala Harris as vice President Trump. At a news conference. Senior Democrats, movie stars, and millionaires began publicly calling for Biden to step down. Former President Trump, whose victory already seemed inevitable, then narrowly avoided an assassination attempt.
What happened.
Former President Donald Trump was rushed off a stage during a Pennsylvania rally. Pops and bangs were heard.
The Secret Service quickly moved to protect the former president.
We've all seen that photo. Trump being whisked away by security, fist in the air, ear bleeding and the American flag billowing behind him. Trump was staunch on the fire and was greeted as a hero at the Republican Convention.
We are here.
Tonight in one purpose, and that is to elect Donald J. Trump as the next President of the United States. He is here tonight to show his courage. He defiant say yet, somebody who tried to kill him, you will not take this man down. He has the courage, the strength, and he will be the next president of the United States.
Biden came down with COVID and had to take a week off the campaign trail, as colleagues begged the man once too young, now unequivocally too old to perform one Larne lost active service for his country and step aside. Now the Democrats challenge is to seize this moment and try to stop the flow of momentum from sweeping Donald Trump and the Republicans back to the White House. This story is moving fast and you can get across the latest right now at the Australian dot com dot au