The highest death toll from coronavirus in the world and an economic fallout leaving millions jobless has compounded the turmoil of a bitterly-divided nation where democracy itself at times seemed in jeopardy.
It falls to Joe Biden to begin a repair job on a gargantuan scale when he enters the White House as the 46th president of the United States on Wednesday.
The Democratic former vice-president to Barack Obama pitched his campaign as a “battle for the soul” of the nation and has been known for reaching across the divide to seal bipartisan agreement during his career in Congress.
Joe Robinette Biden Jr, who at the age of 78 will become the oldest president to take office, was born in Pennsylvania in 1942 to a Catholic family that can trace its roots back to Ballina, Ireland, from where his great, great, great grandfather – Edward Blewitt – left for America during the famine.
Biden earned a law degree from Syracuse University in 1968 and four years later began his first of six terms as a senator for the state of Delaware, being elected in 1972 as the sixth youngest senator in US history at the age of 30.
But his entry into Congress was marred by the darkest of tragedies.
Just weeks after the election, his first wife Neilia was at the wheel of the family’s Chevy station wagon with their three children as they returned from buying a Christmas tree.
A tractor smashed into the car’s side, killing Neilia and baby Naomi. Hunter, then two, sustained a head injury and three-year Beau was treated in hospital with broken bones.
Biden took the oath of office from their hospital room.
“For the first time in my life, I understood how someone could consciously decide to commit suicide,” he later said.
But “the bigger the highs, the deeper the troughs” he would say and he found tactics for coping with his grief, raising his two boys as he rose in seniority in the Senate.
He met Jill Jacobs on a blind date in 1975 and married the aspiring teacher two years later. They had a daughter, Ashley, in 1981.
His first attempt at the White House was in 1988 but he was forced to withdraw from the Democratic nomination contest after he admitted to plagiarising parts of a speech from British Labour leader Neil Kinnock.
The year before, Kinnock said in a conference speech: “Why am I the first Kinnock in a thousand generations to be able to get to university?
“Was it because all our predecessors were thick?”
Without crediting the MP, Biden echoed on the campaign trail: “Why is it that Joe Biden is the first in his family ever to go to a university?
“Is it because our fathers and mothers were not bright?”
Biden continued in the Senate, where his record has come under intense scrutiny from modern-day progressives.
He failed to ensure Anita Hill’s sexual harassment allegations were fairly examined while overseeing the confirmation hearings of Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas.
He played a role drafting a sweeping crime bill blamed for contributing to mass incarceration, voted for deregulation of Wall Street and the war in Iraq.
He also worked with segregationist senators in the 1970s, with a joke during a 2019 fundraiser about one having “never called me ‘boy’, he always called me ‘son’” leading to widespread criticism because of the comment’s racial undertones.
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