After four years in office, President Biden has a long list of accomplishments he takes pride in. But he struggled with inflation, illegal immigration and his own advancing age.
Biden led the country out of the worst pandemic in modern history. He ended America’s longest war, but the withdrawal was a disaster. After Hamas’s attack on Israel, Biden stood by the country. But the war in Gaza lost him support.
President Joe Biden ran for the White House promising to be a transitional figure, then once he got there began thinking of himself as a transformational one. But after a tumultuous four years in office, it turns out he was really neither.
Instead, Biden will end up in the history books as an interregnum between two terms of Donald Trump, a break in the middle of a chaotic period of change, for good or ill. Biden had hoped to make Trump an asterisk in the American story, soon to be forgotten. Now he will be the one trying to make his case for posterity.
He will outlined that case this week in a prime-time farewell address to the nation in advance of leaving office Monday. Biden has a long list of accomplishments he takes pride in, including an expanded social safety net, a revived economy, major efforts to combat climate change and reinvigorated American leadership on the world stage.
“Four years ago, we stood in a winter of peril and a winter of possibilities,” he said in a letter to the public released Wednesday morning in advance of the speech. “We were in the grip of the worst pandemic in a century, the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, and the worst attack on our democracy since the Civil War. But we came together as Americans, and we braved through it. We emerged stronger, more prosperous and more secure.”
But hobbled by inflation, illegal immigration and his own advancing age, Biden leaves office as an unpopular one-term President, turning over the Oval Office to a man he considers a fascist and a danger to democracy. He hopes that history will remember him more fondly than his contemporaries do, and, as with other presidents, it just well might.
However, until the historians get around to their scorecards, here is a look at the highs and lows of the Biden presidency:
Covid-19 pandemic
Biden steered the country out of lockdown after a wave of death.
Biden inherited a country reeling from a year of the Covid-19 pandemic that had by that point killed 400,000 people in the United States; shuttered businesses, schools and government offices; and profoundly altered daily life around the country.
The new President established a process to get a vaccine developed in the final days of Trump’s administration and into the arms of 250 million Americans by the end of his first year in office.
The country reopened and recovered economically. Sky-high unemployment, already falling when Biden took over, was cut again by nearly half. Millions of lost jobs were restored. Covid deaths fell from more than 23,000 a week to fewer than 400 a week.
But public resentment over masks, vaccine mandates and school closures along with the politicisation of the pandemic response and proliferation of conspiracy theories have complicated the conversation on public health and undercut faith in the system.
Afghanistan withdrawal
Biden ended America’s longest war, but the pull-out was a debacle.
Perhaps the darkest chapter of Biden’s presidency was the disastrous 2021 withdrawal from Afghanistan. Biden carried out an agreement that Trump had made with the Taliban to pull all US troops out of Afghanistan, ending America’s longest war 20 years after 9/11.
But the execution was chaotic as the Taliban stormed the capital, Kabul, and took over the country. Thirteen US troops died in a suicide bombing at the city’s airport, and images of desperate Afghans chasing US planes rolling down the tarmac for takeoff embarrassed the United States.
The Afghan people have now returned to the same brutal authoritarian rule that existed before the US invasion, leaving women in particular once again subjugated to unforgiving repression. But US forces still managed to find Ayman al-Zawahri, the leader of al-Qaeda, in Kabul and kill him with a drone strike.
Infrastructure
Biden began rebuilding the nation’s roads, bridges and other facilities.
Biden pushed through a US$1 trillion programme to rebuild the nation’s roads, bridges, airports, water systems, broadband and other infrastructure, achieving what many presidents had promised but failed to do, including Trump.
The spending package passed by Congress in 2021 was the largest investment in public works since President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s interstate highway construction programme. On top of that, Biden did it with Republican votes, forging a bipartisan agreement in the most partisan of eras.
But it takes time to develop plans, get permits and begin turning shovels, so many of the projects were still pending by the end of Biden’s term, and he never got the credit he felt he deserved. Near the end of his presidency, Biden lamented that he did not do more to attach his name to projects he had financed so that voters would know what became of their money.
Spending
Biden invested in manufacturing and curbed drug costs, but debt rose.
Perhaps no President has pushed through a more ambitious legislative agenda since Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society.
As a candidate, Biden positioned himself as a moderate mainly interested in restoring normality after Trump’s explosive tenure. As President, Biden adopted the ambition of becoming another Franklin D. Roosevelt.
In addition to Covid relief and infrastructure, Biden secured passage of legislation intended to curb the cost of prescription drugs for seniors, including a US$35 monthly cap on insulin, while expanding health care for veterans exposed to toxic burn pits, reinvigorating the semiconductor industry, raising taxes on corporations and hiring more IRS agents to pursue wealthy scofflaws.
He pushed the legislation through even though Democrats had the narrowest of margins in the House and a 50-50 split in the Senate resolved only by Vice-President Kamala Harris’ tiebreaking vote. But the narrow margins meant he had to sacrifice other priorities like expanded childcare and free community college. And even then, the national debt rose to historic highs.
Climate change
Biden set aside land, banned drilling and invested in clean energy.
No President has done more to combat climate change than Biden. On the first day of his term, he signed a document to begin bringing the United States back into the Paris climate accord, reversing Trump’s move to withdraw.
Over the next four years, Biden pushed initiatives through executive action and legislation. He secured US$370 billion from Congress to invest in clean energy, the most money ever devoted to fighting climate change. He also preserved hundreds of millions of acres of land and water, more than any of his predecessors.
Even in his final days in office, he ordered a halt to new oil and gas drilling in coastal waters and created two national monuments in California to shield more than 800,000 acres of environmentally sensitive lands. Critics complained that Biden was stifling energy production, even though oil and gas production rose to record levels on his watch.
Russia-Ukraine war
Biden rallied allies to help Ukraine fight off Russian invaders.
The most seismic international crisis of Biden’s presidency was Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Biden exposed Russia by declassifying intelligence, then funnelled tens of billions of dollars in weapons to Ukraine.
With the US’ help, the Ukrainians succeeded beyond anyone’s expectations and prevented Russia from seizing its capital or taking over the country. Biden reinvigorated Nato after ties frayed under Trump and expanded it to admit Sweden and Finland. He even visited Kyiv, Ukraine, in defiance of President Vladimir Putin of Russia, becoming the first American president to travel to a war zone outside US control.
But the war has devolved into a grinding stalemate, with Russia controlling 20% of Ukraine. Biden was criticised by both sides: Ukraine supporters complained he was too reluctant to send the most advanced weapons, for fear of nuclear escalation, while isolationists complained he was investing too much in someone else’s war.
Immigration
Biden presided over record levels of illegal immigration.
Biden wanted to reverse his predecessor’s hostility to immigration and reverse some of his most restrictive policies. But in doing so, illegal crossings at the southern border skyrocketed to record highs and put stress on states and cities unable to cope with the flood of migrants.
While opponents excoriated him for what Trump called “an invasion,” Biden rarely addressed the issue publicly. Only after Democrats complained, including mayors of northern cities, did he focus more intensely on the problem and strike a bipartisan deal with Senate Republicans to impose tough limits.
But Trump, openly admitting he did not want to give Biden a political victory, torpedoed the deal by pressuring House Republicans to block it. In the final summer of his term, Biden used executive power to tighten border rules, and illegal crossings fell to levels even lower than when Trump left office.
Inflation
The steepest price hikes in 40 years hobbled Biden’s presidency.
While the economy bounced back from the Covid-19 pandemic, inflation rose sharply under Biden, shocking Americans who had not experienced such a phenomenon since the early 1980s.
Inflation peaked at 9.1% in summer 2022, the highest in four decades, and cumulatively, prices rose about 20% during Biden’s term. The cost of gasoline, groceries and housing left many Americans feeling strapped.
How much Biden was to blame was a matter of debate. Inflation struck many highly industrialised countries after the pandemic, fuelled by supply chain shortages and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. But even some Democrats argued that Biden’s US$1.9 trillion pandemic relief package exacerbated inflation.
By the end of last year, thanks in large part to Federal Reserve interest rate increases, inflation had been brought down to a relatively normal 2.9%. But that only meant the rate of increase had slowed. Prices that went up stayed up.
Investigations
Investigations into Hunter Biden dogged the President.
Republicans spent much of Biden’s presidency investigating him in the hopes of proving that his family had profited from his political career. Evidence surfaced showing that Hunter Biden, the President’s son, parleyed his last name into millions of dollars from foreign business ventures.
But the President’s opponents failed to come up with evidence that he had ever improperly used his power as Vice-President or President, and a conservative push to impeach him fizzled. Likewise, a special counsel investigation into Biden’s handling of classified documents resulted in no criminal charges.
Still, Hunter Biden was convicted of lying on a federal firearms application about his drug use and pleaded guilty to failure to pay taxes. His father, after vowing not to pardon his son, ultimately did so anyway, drawing criticism not just from Republicans but also from fellow Democrats.
Israel-Hamas war
Biden stood by Israel after Hamas’s attack, but the war in Gaza cost him support.
Biden struggled to keep a lid on the Middle East even as war broke out on multiple fronts. He rallied behind Israel after the Hamas terrorist attack of October 7, 2023, and flew there personally to give Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu a hug on the tarmac and, by extension, the traumatised Israeli people.
But as Israel waged a relentless war of retaliation in Gaza, Biden grew frustrated with Netanyahu’s failure to do more to avoid civilian casualties and ease the humanitarian crisis. At one point, Biden halted a weapons shipment, although he still sent plenty of other arms and ordered US forces to defend Israel against two missile attacks by Iran.
Critics on the left accused Biden of abetting genocide, while critics on the right accused him of undercutting Israel. But after months of painstaking negotiations, he brokered a ceasefire Wednesday just days before leaving office that, if implemented, would finally end the fighting and bring home the remaining hostages held by Hamas.
Concerns about age
Biden’s disastrous debate performance highlighted concerns about his age.
From the moment he took office, Biden was the oldest President in American history. Rather than be the “bridge” to another generation, as he promised, he decided to run for reelection, even though he would be 86 at the end of a second term.
But he increasingly showed signs of age. He shuffled when he walked, mixed up names or words and had a harder time projecting his voice. While aides insisted he was still sharp and making good decisions, his physical appearance stirred doubts among voters, who told pollsters he was too old to run again.
His fumbling performance at a June debate with Trump sealed his fate. Biden looked pale and frail, he struggled at times to complete a sentence, and he appeared blank at other moments. Democrats panicked and pressured him into withdrawing. Harris replaced him on the ticket, and she lost to Trump.
Democracy
Biden failed to persuade voters that Trump threatens democracy.
Biden framed his presidency as a “battle for the soul of America,” but if so, it was a battle he did not win.
Taking office after Trump supporters stormed the Capitol to try to keep him in power, Biden tried to persuade Americans that the future of democracy was at stake and that Trump should be consigned to history.
But the unity Biden promised never materialised, and the country grew more divided. Trump urged “termination” of the Constitution to restore himself to power and talked about being a dictator on Day One if he won another term. Biden could not convince enough voters in 2024 that Trump posed a threat.
On the contrary, many voters accepted Trump’s argument that prosecutions against him for trying to illegally overturn an election were just a partisan witch hunt. And now Trump vows “retribution” against his adversaries.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Peter Baker
Photographs by: Doug Mills, Erin Schaff, Meridith Kohut, Jim Huylebroek, Victor J. Blue, Pete Marovich, Todd Heisler, Bryan Anselm, Jim Wilson, Hilary Swift, Daniel Berehulak, Tyler Hicks, Ivan Pierre Aguirre, An Rong Xu, Kerry Tasker, Haiyun Jiang, Tamir Kalifa, Samar Abu Elouf, Al Drago and Eric Lee
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