As Biden closes out half a century of political career, his failure to turn the page on Trump weighs on the president

President Biden’s half-century political career comes to an end on Monday President-elect Trump is inaugurated and succeeds Biden in the White House.

While the Democratic senator from Delaware, two-term vice president and one-term president can point to a slew of legislative victories and other accomplishments during his four years in the White House, Biden leaves office as one of the most unpopular presidents in history. history of the nation.

And Biden, who successfully defeated Trump in the 2020 election when he pledged to turn the page on his predecessor, faces a legacy tarnished by his inability to prevent Trump from returning to the presidency.

Biden, in an open letter to the American people on Wednesday, appeared to acknowledge that he failed to deliver on the comprehensive promise of his 2020 campaign.

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“I ran for president because I believed the soul of America was at stake. The very nature of who we are was at stake,” Biden wrote.

But he regretted “this is still the case”.

“President Biden went ahead and was elected on a platform of returning to normalcy in 2020. And while the voters seemed to want it in principle, history will remember that Biden failed to deliver on his promise,” said the veteran political scientist Wayne Lesperance. , the president of New England College, told Fox News.

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Biden, in a farewell address to the nation last week, aimed to cement his legacy as a president who pushed to stabilize politics at home while strengthening America’s leadership abroad and as leader who led the nation out of the COVID-19 pandemic. made historic investments in infrastructure and clean energy, boosted the economy and achieved historic gains in job creation, and lowered prescription drug prices for millions of Americans.

But he also used his speech “to warn the country” that “an oligarchy is forming in America of extreme wealth, power and influence that literally threatens our entire democracy. Our basic rights, freedoms and a fair chance to everyone can move forward.”

Biden ends his one term in the White House with approval ratings that remain well under water.

It stood at 42% approval and 57% disapproval in the latter Fox News National Poll, which ran from January 10 to 13 and was published on Thursday.

Only 36% of Americans approve of the job Biden has been doing in the White House, according to the latest CNN poll, which matched the president’s previous low mark in the cable news network poll during Biden’s tenure in the White House.

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And Biden’s approval rating was at 43 percent, slightly higher but still in negative territory, in national polls by USA Today/Suffolk University and Marist College All surveys were conducted in early to mid-January.

Biden’s approval rating hovered in the low 50s during his first six months in the White House. However, the president’s numbers began to drop in August 2021 in the wake of Biden’s much-criticized handling of the turmoil. US withdrawal from Afghanistan, and after a spike in COVID-19 cases that summer that occurred mostly among unvaccinated people.

The drop in the president’s approval rating was also fueled by rising inflation, which began rising in the summer of 2021 and remains a major concern for Americans’ pocketbooks to date. and the increase in migrants trying to cross into the US throughout the southern border

Biden’s approval ratings went underwater in the fall of 2021 and never resurfaced in positive territory.

The latest polls also indicate that many Americans see Biden’s presidency as a failure.

Sixty-one percent of adults across the country questioned in the CNN poll said they see Biden’s presidency overall as a failure, with 38% seeing it as a success.

According to the USA Today/Suffolk University Poll44% of registered voters said history will judge Biden as a failed president, and 27% said he will be judged a fair president. Twenty-one percent of those polled said history will see Biden as a good president, and only 5% said he will be seen as a great president.

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Just over a third of adults nationwide polled in the Marist poll said Biden will be remembered as one of the worst presidents in U.S. history, with 19% saying he will be considered an inferior president of the average

Twenty-eight percent of respondents offered that Biden’s legacy will be considered average, and 19% said he would be considered above average or one of the best presidents in the country’s history.

Biden, in one of his last interviews in office, told MSNBC in an admission of regret that “ironically, I almost spent too much time on politics, not enough time on politics.”

It also weighs on Biden’s legacy: his ill-fated re-election run.

In April 2023, Biden, then 80 years old, announced his candidacy for re-election. Fourteen months later, Biden was losing ground to Trump in the 2024 election polls when he suffered a disastrous debate performance against the former president, sparking deep concern among voters about his physical and cognitive ability to handle four more years in the White House.

Less than a month later, after an outcry from his fellow Democrats, Biden announced that he would end his campaign and endorse Vice President Kamala Harris to serve as the party’s 2024 standard-bearer.

Two and a half months after Trump’s landslide victory over Harris, Biden still faces a lot of blame for the Democrats’ electoral setback in November.

Longtime Democratic strategist James Carville told Fox News that “the story of Joe Biden is one of the great tragedies of American politics. I really mean it. He should have a glorious, well-deserved, and very acclaimed. And it’s not.”

And Carville, a political mastermind behind former President Bill Clinton’s historic White House victory in 1992, argued that “it’s hard to blame anyone but him.”

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But Biden’s friends and supporters believe negative views of the soon-to-be former president will change over time.

“Biden, because of some of the legislation he was able to push through, is going to look pretty good,” longtime Democratic consultant John MacNeil, a Biden supporter, told Fox News. “The fruits of some of what Biden accomplished will only become visible over the next few years.”

But MacNeil, founding director of Unite the Country, the super PAC that propelled the then-former vice president through the 2020 Democratic primary, also acknowledged that Biden may “be seen as a hiccup between Trump one and Trump two. That it’s something historians will talk about.”