Joe Biden

As a boy in Scranton, Pennsylvania, Joe Biden stuttered so badly that classmates called him "Dash" and a nun mocked him in front of the class. He practiced for hours, reciting Yeats and Emerson in front of a mirror and watching the movement of his face to control the stammer. The effort to master his own speech became a lifelong habit of perseverance, and he later spoke often to children who stutter.

He was born on November 20, 1942, in Scranton, at 8:30 in the morning, a time Astro-Databank gives an A rating. His Sun is in late Scorpio, with Mercury and Venus also in Scorpio, all three in the twelfth house, where astrologers look for grief, private suffering and endurance behind closed doors. Scorpio is the sign of loss, intensity and survival. A Scorpio cluster in the twelfth describes someone who carries deep personal pain, and Biden's life was marked by tragedies that he spoke about openly for decades.

In 1972, at twenty-nine, he was elected to the United States Senate from Delaware. Weeks later, his wife, Neilia, and their infant daughter, Naomi, were killed in a car crash, and his young sons, Beau and Hunter, were badly injured. He was sworn in at their hospital bedside. For the next thirty-six years he commuted home to Wilmington by train nearly every day so he could be with his boys. In 2015 Beau died of brain cancer.

His Ascendant is in Sagittarius, a placement that brings an expansive, optimistic, talkative manner and a tendency to speak off the cuff. Biden became famous for his warmth and his tendency to say more than he intended, and Sagittarius is the sign of both.

Saturn, retrograde in Gemini, sits in his seventh house. Gemini rules speech, and Saturn there describes difficulties and restrictions that must be worked through over many years, a fitting echo of the childhood stutter.

His Moon had barely entered Taurus and sits in the fifth house, which governs children. A Taurus Moon is loyal and steady, and in the fifth it ties emotional life to one's children. Biden's devotion to his family, and his grief for the children he lost, defined his public persona.

Jupiter, retrograde in Cancer, falls in his eighth house of loss and shared bonds, describing a family life tested by tragedy but also held together by it. He married Jill Jacobs in 1977, and their daughter, Ashley, was born in 1981.

He chaired the Senate Judiciary and Foreign Relations committees, ran for president in 1988 and 2008, and served as Barack Obama's vice president for eight years. In 2020 he defeated Donald Trump and became, at seventy-eight, the oldest person inaugurated as president. In July 2024, after a difficult debate performance, he withdrew from the race for a second term. In 2025 he announced that he had been diagnosed with an aggressive form of prostate cancer. The Scorpio planets in his twelfth house carried his losses; the Taurus Moon kept him steady through them.