WASHINGTON — By the standard President Biden set himself, the core purpose he proclaimed when he ran in 2020, it is impossible to assess his one-term presidency as anything but a failure.
“We are in a battle for the soul of this nation,” Biden said as he began his campaign in 2019. “If we give Donald Trump eight years in the White House, he will forever and fundamentally alter the character of this nation. And I cannot stand by and watch that happen.”
Now Trump has a chance to do precisely what Biden wanted to prevent — to complete eight years in the White House and put his stamp on American politics for decades to come. And there will be little Biden can do beyond stand by and watch.
Biden’s insistence on running for a second term at the age of 81 despite voters’ doubts that he was up to the job, and his disastrous debate performance in June, threw his party into a three-week-long crisis. By the time he dropped out of the race in July, it was too late to stage an orderly competition among potential successors; his vice president, Kamala Harris, had only 103 days to campaign.
But there was far more to Biden’s four years in office than his physical decline and his monumental blunder in trying to run.
The death of former President Carter serves as a reminder that presidents who look like failures on the way out the door are often reassessed more generously a decade or four down the road.
Carter left office in 1981 after a single term as the popular archetype of presidential failure thanks to a stagnant economy, foreign policy crises and a landslide defeat to Ronald Reagan.
Over time, though, historians began to focus on the underappreciated accomplishments of Carter’s tenure: new standards for ethics in government, a focus on human rights in foreign policy, and the first steps toward reducing U.S. dependence on fossil fuels.
So it may also be with the president who leaves office this month.
During his first two years in office, bolstered by Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress, Biden achieved an impressive record of economic legislation: a $1.9-trillion stimulus bill to help the economy recover from the COVID-19 pandemic, a $1.2-trillion infrastructure bill, the $280-billion CHIPS act to promote high-technology manufacturing, and the $2.2-trillion Inflation Reduction Act to promote clean energy.
After a spike of post-pandemic inflation that left grocery and gasoline prices stubbornly high, Biden’s virtuoso acts of congressional deal-making didn’t help his standing with voters as much as he hoped.
But as he noted ruefully in a valedictory speech last month, Americans may recognize the full benefits of those laws only once he’s out of office.
“I know it’s been hard for many Americans to see, and I understand it,” the president said. “They’re just trying to figure out how to put three squares on the table. But I believe it was the right thing to do … [to] set America on a stronger course for the future.”
“In the space of one term, he did a lot,” said historian Julian E. Zelizer of Princeton University, who has already begun work on a book about the Biden presidency. “Those are bills that will reap dividends for years to come.
“At the same time, politics matters,” Zelizer added. “One-term presidents who don’t succeed politically often give way to a successor who moves the country in a very different direction — and that’s part of their legacy, too. … Both things — the successes and failures — can be true at the same time.”
The tragedy of Biden’s presidency is that he once suggested an alternative path — that he might decide to serve only one term as a transitional president.
“I view myself as a bridge, not as anything else,” Biden said during his 2020 campaign. “There’s an entire generation of leaders you saw stand behind me. They are the future of this country.”
But once he was in office, aides said, he never seriously considered passing up a second term.
He saw himself as the only candidate who had proved that he could defeat Trump. And when Democrats did relatively well in the 2022 congressional election, he viewed the result as confirmation that his approach was working.
His 80th birthday came 12 days later — and his age, despite his denials, was beginning to show. By the middle of 2023, 77% of voters said they thought Biden was too old to serve another term, including a stunning 69% of Democrats.
“His decision to run was an act with massive consequences,” Zelizer said. “A younger candidate might have been able to change the course of the election.”
The irony now is that Biden’s legacy now rests in Trump’s hands.
If Trump manages to dismantle most or all of the programs Biden put in place and remakes the political landscape as Reagan did in the 1980s, Biden’s achievements will prove to have been short-lived.
But if Trump fails — if his administration proves chaotic, if Democrats take control of Congress in 2026, and if a next-generation Democrat retakes the White House in 2028 — the Biden legacy may get a second life.
Neither of those scenarios, of course, is one Biden ever sought. But now he is left, as he once feared, to merely stand and watch what happens.
