WASHINGTON – Joe Biden promised nothing short of a national exorcism when he took office. He wanted to “restore the soul" of the country and prove that Donald Trump was only a footnote in the American story, not its next chapter.
The pitch was “let's try to get things back to normal as best we can,” said Sean Wilentz, a historian who met twice with Biden in the White House.
Recommended Videos
It didn't work out that way. Despite exceeding expectations when it came to cutting bipartisan deals and rallying foreign allies, Biden was unable to turn the page on Trump. Four years after voters chose Biden over Trump, they picked Trump to replace Biden. It's an immutable and crushing outcome for an aging politician in the last act of his long career, one that will likely become the prism for how Biden is viewed through history.
“The fact is, the abnormality did not end,” said Wilentz, a professor at Princeton University. “He may not have appreciated what he was up against.”
Biden will offer his own perspective on how he wishes to be remembered in the Oval Office on Wednesday evening, when he'll deliver a farewell address. But Trump’s impending return underscores the limits of Biden’s ability to reshape the country’s trajectory as his celebrated predecessors were able to do. With the end of his single term only days away, it’s unclear how Biden will reconcile his hopes for his presidency with the results.
The country isn't waiting for his assessment. Only a quarter of Americans said Biden was a good or great president, according to the latest poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. That's lower than the views of the twice-impeached Trump when he left office soon after the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol and during the deadly depths of the coronavirus pandemic.
Biden’s friends and supporters insist that views will shift over time.
“We lost a close election under closely contested, hard fought issues, but that doesn’t mean that what we did and how we did it hasn’t helped change the country for the better," said Steve Ricchetti, a longtime adviser to Biden who served as White House counselor.
Ricchetti argued that Biden provided a model for repairing damage caused by Trump, one that will help another president down the line.
“There is no question that this is a strategy that will enable a successful presidency into the future," he insisted.
Trump will enter office Monday promising an even more aggressive effort to reshape the country than his turbulent first term. His comeback is calling into question — even among Biden loyalists — whether the outgoing president was only a fleeting reminder of a fading political era.
“Which one is the aberration, Biden or Trump?” said Sen. Chris Coons, a Democrat from Biden’s home state of Delaware. “Has the United States permanently moved in a populist and right-wing direction, and Biden was just a temporary interruption?”
Coons isn’t sure yet.
“I think it is an open question,” he said.
Biden went from young upstart to aging leader
For better and worse, the arc of Biden's political career is intertwined with his age. He became the youngest senator in U.S. history when he took office in 1973 at 30 years old, the bare constitutional minimum.
He ran for president twice, falling short both times, before becoming Barack Obama's running mate in 2008.
By this point, Biden was a Washington veteran. David Axelrod, a longtime adviser to Obama, said one of the benefits of choosing Biden was how old he was. Biden would be 74 when Obama left office — too old to seek the presidency a third time, they presumed.
“You want your vice president to be concentrating on the task at hand, and not planning eight years ahead for their own candidacies," Axelrod said.
What happened next is a central part of Biden's political mythos. Mourning the death of his elder son to cancer, Biden thought he was done with politics — until Trump's comments in 2017 about “very fine people, on both sides” of racial violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, prompted him to run again.
Biden overcame doubters who believed he was past his prime, seizing the Democratic nomination as the political moment aligned with his message. He showed empathy while Trump appeared callous about the COVID-19 pandemic, and he promised competence instead of chaos.
When Biden took office, he hung a portrait of Franklin Delano Roosevelt above the fireplace in the Oval Office. It was an unmistakable signal that he wanted to be a transformational figure, not a transitional one.
Biden signed legislation to provide massive investments in infrastructure, clean energy and computer chip manufacturing, as well as a massive economic stimulus to power the country's recovery from the pandemic. He also limited the cost of prescription drugs and enacted tighter rules on gun purchases.
“There were these powerful entities that the Democratic Party had been unsuccessful in confronting,” said Sen. Chris Murphy, a Democrat from Connecticut. “And Biden beat them all.”
But he fell short of his ambitions to expand social services, including lowering the cost of child care and sustaining programs to cut child poverty, while a generational surge in inflation sparked a political backlash and questions about the wisdom of some of his spending.
More challenges came overseas. After fumbling the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, Biden rallied Western support for Ukraine to prevent Russian domination. He also remained resolutely behind Israel after the Oct. 7, 2023, attack by Hamas, disappointing some Democrats who wanted to see greater effort to protect Palestinian civilians.
Biden's effort to hold on to the presidency unraveled, clearing a path for Trump
Despite Biden's accomplishments, voters were concerned about other matters. They were frustrated by rising costs that chipped away at their paychecks. And they worried about illegal migration at the southern border.
As the problems festered, Trump gained momentum and Biden struggled.
“Biden was very interested in becoming a historic president," Axelrod said. “That was sort of an obsession. So he had a hard time acknowledging mistakes or failure.”
After a lifetime of seeking the presidency, Biden had no interest in relinquishing it. He announced his reelection campaign even though he would be 86 at the end of his second term. The decision created another parallel to Roosevelt, although not one that Biden would have wanted.
Roosevelt pursued a fourth term in 1944 despite his failing health, believing himself to be indispensable while World War II was still underway. He died months after winning his last election.
Biden ran for reelection while brushing aside Americans’ fears that he was too old for the job. He had beaten Trump before, and Biden insisted he was singularly capable of doing so again.
But he was forced to drop out of the race over the summer after stumbling through a debate against Trump. His performance sparked a crisis of confidence in a party unified by its shared desired to block Trump's return. The damage lingered even after Biden endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris as his successor. She lost.
Two days after the election, Biden addressed the nation from the Rose Garden, where he talked up his “historic presidency” and shared an optimistic message about the future.
“The American experiment endures, and we’re going to be OK, but we need to stay engaged,” he said. “We need to keep going. And, above all, we need to keep the faith.”
Ben LaBolt, the White House communications director, compared Biden to former Presidents Harry Truman and Lyndon Johnson, who were also unpopular when they left office.
“They governed during a very challenging time for the country and the world, but they did big things to set the country up on the path for the future and to tackle some significant challenges,” he said.
On Friday, a reporter asked Biden if he regretted running for reelection and whether his decision paved the way for Trump's resurgence.
“I don’t think so,” he said.
In fact, Biden maintained, he could have won if he stayed in the race.