How and when Trump and Biden mention their parents differ greatly

To the long list of traits dividing the two leading candidates for the presidency of the United States, add this: what they have said (or not said) about their parents.

President Biden has used his time in the White House to repeatedly speak about his father's profound influence. Former President Trump spoke much less during his time in Washington about his father, and usually in admiring but less sentimental terms.

Undated photo of Joe Biden, right, with his father, Joseph R. Biden Sr.

(Biden Archives)

This Father's Day, the Biden administration is likely to issue a proclamation recognizing dads in general and presidential father Joseph Robinette Biden Sr. in particular.

The younger Biden has repeatedly invoked his father, crediting Biden Sr., for example, with planting the seeds of his hatred of anti-Semitism, inspiring his support for paid family medical leave and fueling his determination to end human trafficking. .

Trump credited Fred Trump Sr. as a tough patriarch but a powerful influence in his life: instilling a belief in hard work and the conviction that private companies do a much better job than the government.

Those opinions are recorded in the American Presidency Project, a comprehensive digital archive of documents and communications based at UC Santa Barbara. The database includes a search engine that makes it easy to find all kinds of esoteric information, including what all 46 presidents said about their fathers.

Two men in suits and ties, both smiling, with skyscrapers in the background

The history of presidential fathers is wildly divergent, including doting fathers, such as Prescott Bush, father of George HW Bush, and scoundrels, such as Roger Clinton, Bill Clinton's stepfather, who drank heavily and beat his wife, Virginia, regularly.

Biden has cited “my dad” or “my father” more than 200 times since taking office in 2021, and rarely goes a week without mentioning Biden Sr., naming his father for things like his determination to support to Israel and his pride in his Irish roots, as the archive shows.

Trump invoked “my father” 21 times during his four years as president, including the time he boasted about how his father's negotiating prowess laid the groundwork for his own haggling with Boeing to get a “great deal” on a replacement for the Air Force One, the Show the UCSB file. (The Air Force expressed concern about getting all the cutting-edge features it demanded, given the reduced price, Bloomberg reported.)

I know many of you always fool me for always quoting my dad.

— President Biden

Trump never uttered “father” or “dad” in his inaugural address, and his father never appeared in his State of the Union addresses.

At his inauguration, Biden recounted his father's financial struggles and cited him in all of his State of the Union addresses. “I know a lot of you always make fun of me for always quoting my father,” Biden said in his 2023 speech before launching into yet another story about his father.

Two women, one in a cream evening dress and the other in a black one, are flanked by men in dark suits and bow ties.

In the fine tradition of presidential image-making, neither the current nor the previous occupant used their time in the White House to delve into the darker or more complex nuances of their relationships with their parents.

Trump worked with his father when the family's real estate company faced a pair of lawsuits alleging it denied apartments to black tenants. The Trumps rejected the charges. They settled a case by allowing a black family to move into the family's housing complex in Cincinnati. The other case ended in another agreement, in which the family did not admit to any wrongdoing but agreed to rent to tenants of all races.

Before his time in the Oval Office, Trump acknowledged that it was not easy being the son of a ruthless businessman. “That's why I'm so screwed, because I had a father who put a lot of pressure on me,” he wrote in his 2007 book, “Think Big.”

A man in a suit and tie with another older man, both wearing a suit and tie and smiling

Biden's father went through a variety of jobs in a career of busts and booms. Biden senior, a man who preferred ascots, clay pigeon shooting and show jumping horses, at times lived a more patrician lifestyle than his son's folksy, working-class stories might suggest.

In his memoir, “Promises to Keep: On Life and Politics,” Biden acknowledged discovering a polo mallet, jodhpurs and other signs of a privileged life in his father's closet. He also described some distance from the man he idolized. “I never asked him much about his life,” Biden wrote, “and he didn't offer.”

During World War II, when the future president was a young child, the elder Biden worked for a defense contracting company. A profile in the New Yorker described how the US government accused the company of making excessive profits (which were limited during the war effort) and forced it to return some of the money. Biden Sr. was an employee, although close to the company owner. He faced no charges of wrongdoing.

That's why I'm so screwed, because I had a father who put a lot of pressure on me.

— Former President Trump

Profiles of Trump have chronicled a childhood of considerable privilege, funded by his father's real estate holdings. But abundance came at a price.

Trump's parents sent their incorrigible second son to a military school 90 minutes from New York City, just after his 13th birthday. A childhood friend recalled to Politico how Trump told him that his father had ordered him “to be a 'king,' to be a 'killer.'” An instructor at the school told a biographer that Trump Sr. had been “really tough” on the young people. Donald.

When announcing his presidential bid in 2015, Trump professed his love for his father. “I learned a lot,” Trump said at Trump Tower. “He was a great negotiator. I learned a lot from sitting at his feet playing with blocks listening to him negotiate with subcontractors.”

A man in a dark suit and red tie, with his arms crossed, speaks in front of a desk with framed photographs and a statue of a person on a horse.

The future president said he defied his father in at least one way. “I used to say, 'Donald, don't go to Manhattan.' Those are the big leagues. We don't know anything about that. Don't do it,'” Trump said during the start of his campaign. “I said, 'I have to go to Manhattan.' I have to build those big buildings. I have to do it, dad. I have to do it'”.

“My father never bullied me, like most people did,” Trump wrote in his memoir, “The Art of the Deal.” “I stood up to him and he respected it. We had a relationship that was almost professional.”

Fred Trump Sr. died in 1999 at age 93. Mary Anne MacLeod Trump, the future president's mother, died the following year at age 88.

In early 2019, he told the Conservative Political Action Congress that his father had taught him: “No one got rich sitting behind their desk.” Trump added: “He was saying, 'You have to be in this place.' You have to be with the contractors. You have to see if you are being scammed. You have to pick up every nail that falls, every piece of wood.'”

Trump said his father's advice paid off in his 2016 victory over Hillary Clinton, in which he won by spending a little more than half what the Democrat spent.

“My father said, 'If you could do it for less and win, that's a good thing, not a bad thing,'” Trump said at a rally in Minneapolis in 2019. “If you can build a building for less money than the guy across the street, and “If it's a nicer building and you can rent it for less… that's a good thing.”

When Joe Biden Sr. died in 2002 at age 86, his son praised him as “a dreamer charged with reality.”

A man in a tan suit and tie, left, standing next to a woman in a dark dress and a man in a dark jacket and white pants.

The president's frequent invocations of his father are filled with affection, recalling that his father called him “Joey” and “honey.”

Just a week after Biden took the Oval Office, he mentioned his father in a White House document, in an official statement on the occasion of International Holocaust Memorial Day.

“The first time I learned about the horrors of the Holocaust was listening to my father at the dinner table,” Biden said. “The passion I felt that we should have done more to prevent the Nazi campaign of systematic mass murder has stayed with me all my life.”

Biden said he had taken his children to visit the Nazi Dachau death camp in Germany and that he intended to take each of his grandchildren so they “understand deep down what can happen when people “He turns his head and does not act.”

It was one of a dozen times as president that Biden invoked his father to explain his disdain for anti-Semitism or his support for Israel.

The president also cited his father as having taught him to abhor the abuse of power. She told Congress in a statement that counseling was the source of her determination to “eliminate all forms of gender-based violence in the United States and around the world,” which she called “a central part of my life's work.”

Biden is more likely to cite one of his father's business setbacks, rather than his successes, as a key life lesson. He told a crowd in his hometown of Scranton, Pennsylvania, about the time his father lost his job and had to take “the longest walk a father can take” to break the news to the people. children of him. “That's a hard thing for a proud man or woman to do. But many had to do it,” Biden said.

Biden Sr. later left his wife and children at his own father's house to move to Delaware for a new job as a car salesman, returning to Scranton to see his family on weekends.

Biden said his father told him: “Joey, a job is so much more than a paycheck. It's about your dignity. It's about respect. It's about being able to look your child in the eyes and say, 'Honey, everything is going to be okay.'”

On his first Memorial Day as president, Biden cited what he said was his father's central philosophy: “That we all have the right to dignity… and to respect and decency and honor… These are not empty words , but the vital and beating heart of our nation.”

Like the Biden White House, the Trump administration issued proclamations honoring dads each Father's Day.

“Increasingly, scientific studies show that parents who actively invest in their children improve their lives emotionally, physically, academically, and financially,” read one line from Trump's 2019 statement.

Unlike Biden's Father's Day remarks, which included remembrances about Biden Sr., Trump's remarks talked about dads more generally. No one mentioned Fred Trump Sr. by name.

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