Biden leaves office with a very mixed record

Mandatory Credit: Photo by MANDEL NGAN/POOL/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock (15102826n) US President Joe Biden delivers his farewell address to the nation from the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, DC, USA, 15 January 2025. US President Biden delivers his farewell address to the nation from the Oval Office, Washington, USA - 15 Jan 2025 Credit: MANDEL NGAN/POOL/EPA-EFE/Shutter/MANDEL NGAN/POOL/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock
As Joe Biden’s time in the White House draws to a close, his approval ratings are, shockingly, slightly lower than Donald Trump’s at the close of his first term, after the attempts to overturn the 2020 election: 37% vs. 38%.
Does Biden deserve the harsh judgment? Will history be as harsh? Obviously, we won’t know the answer for a while. But today, even Biden’s strongest fans have to have, at best, mixed feelings about his record.
Four years ago, Biden was hailed as the man who reclaimed the presidency from Trump. One of his top priorities was to prevent Trump from reclaiming it and to avert what he repeatedly described as an authoritarian threat to democracy. At that, he clearly failed for many complicated reasons.
Many aspects of Biden’s record are still being debated. There is no agreement, for instance, on how much blame the Biden administration should bear for the inflation that created widespread dissatisfaction with an otherwise strong economy.
There is no agreement, either, on whether the chaos at the border was a result of Biden’s immigration-friendly policies. While he relaxed the rules for asylum-seeking in a reversal from the hard-line Trump-era stance, analysts such as the Cato Institute’s David Bier argue that expulsions and detentions of immigrants here illegally actually increased and that the surge in border crossings was largely due to high demand for labor and increased availability of migration-related information on the internet. But Biden was unable to counter the perception that he had allowed illegal migration to get out of control.
Was Biden to blame for the botched exit from Afghanistan, from which his approval ratings never recovered? While it was Trump who negotiated the withdrawal, the buck still stops with the sitting president.
And, while Biden deserves praise for his strong commitment to Ukraine and condemnation of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s aggression, it now seems increasingly clear that his administration’s support for Ukraine’s war effort was inadequate — partly because of Republican obstruction, but also because of the administration’s own exaggerated fears of Putin’s nuclear bluff.
Above all, though, Biden’s presidency was fatally undercut by the very personal problem of his aging — and by the reckless way in which he and his staff dealt with it. His most consequential error was the decision to seek a second term despite polls which consistently showed that the majority of Americans didn’t want him to run and thought he was too old. After a disastrous debate with Trump which exposed his mental decline, he still resisted calls to drop out of the race, leaving little time for the Democrats to regroup and for Kamala Harris to campaign.
Recent revelations that Biden’s closest advisers knowingly limited access to the president so as to hide his condition from the media, from Democratic leaders and even from some members of his own staff, not only cast a shadow over the Biden presidency, they will also expose the Democrats to accusations of hypocrisy when they go after the incoming Trump administration on issues of ethics and transparency.
Will history be kinder to Biden than the present moment? Jimmy Carter, who died last month, was recently seen in a much more positive light than when he lost his reelection bid in 1980.
The history of the Biden presidency is yet to be written. But today, its results look depressing for a man who became president in the twilight of a very long career — and who unquestionably loves his country.
OPINIONS EXPRESSED BY Cathy Young, a writer for The Bulwark, are her own.