President Joe Biden has been a busy man, trying to squeeze in parts of his agenda right before Donald Trump retakes the Oval Office. It’s too bad he wasn’t this active during his presidency.
In the past five days, Biden has made multiple moves to cement his legacy. He blocked the merger of U.S. Steel and Japan’s Nippon Steel. He banned offshore oil and gas drilling on more than 625 million federal acres and is poised to create two new national monuments in California that will preserve 848,000 acres.
He signed the Social Security Fairness Act, which will increase benefits for nearly 3 million people, and on Tuesday, his administration banned medical debt from affecting credit reports.
If you look back just a few weeks, the accomplishments grow to include more student loan debt relief, commuting the sentences of nearly every person on federal death row and enacting the nation’s first anti-hazing law.
This is the fervor with which Biden should have acted throughout the past four years.
This is the man who is willing to implement new ideas that will curtail climate change and benefit Americans in tangible ways. Biden’s legacy could have been monumental had he kept that same energy all four years and through the reelection campaign.
Instead, Biden’s legacy may be remembered as little more than an intermission between the first and second terms of Trump. That’s likely to be true even if Biden has accomplished more to help Americans than Trump ever will.
Biden avoided a recession and invested in America. Will it be remembered?
That isn’t to say that Biden’s four years as president went on without accomplishments. Washington Post columnist Matt Bai described the 46th president as having “the most successful two-year legislative cycle of any president in memory.”
Still, it does not change how the American public perceives him.
In his first year as president, the United States was on the brink of a recession thanks to COVID-19. Biden kept us from economic collapse. During that time, he signed a $1 trillion infrastructure bill with bipartisan support and signed the CHIPS and Science Act, which invested more than $50 billion in the U.S. semiconductor industry.
In 2022, he signed the Inflation Reduction Act, considered the largest U.S. plan to curtail climate change. That same year, he signed the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, the largest gun safety legislation in three decades.
Overall, the economy under Biden fared better than Trump’s messaging would have you believe. His administration added 16 million jobs to the U.S. economy.
Unemployment stayed at or under 4% for a record stretch of time. In the last months of his presidency, inflation has eased to 2.4%.
In an exclusive interview with USA TODAY, Biden said Trump even privately complimented some of this administration’s economic achievements.
Biden has also appointed 235 federal judges, the most of any president in a single term. About 60% of those judges are people of color.
Many of these accomplishments are important but unlikely to have staying power.
Trump’s imminent presidency means that a lot of the wins of the Biden administration will be short-lived. Some of his best policy moves have already expired or will expire soon. This will affect how his presidency is remembered.
Biden’s legacy will be a mixed bag of legislative wins and messaging losses
Despite the wins, Biden is more likely to be remembered as the guy who didn’t know when to quit. He failed to step out of the 2024 presidential race until halfway through the summer after a disastrous debate against Trump, giving Vice President Kamala Harris a little more than 100 days to try to defeat Trump.
In that same interview with USA TODAY, he says he still believes he could have defeated Trump. I doubt that’s true.
Biden will be remembered as the old man who handed the country over to Trump instead of the transitory president he claimed he would be, and history could ultimately show that he was. The economy he helped save and then helped thrive was never appreciated after Democrats lost that messaging.
The unforgiving American public has already made it clear they no longer back Biden:
More than half of Americans surveyed by Gallup believe Biden will be remembered unfavorably. Trump’s ratings, on the other hand, have improved since he left office in 2021, with 40% of respondents now evaluating his first term as “outstanding” or “above average.”
Unfortunately, a man’s decades-long career in politics could be quickly reduced to a few talking points, most of them likely to fade away with the second Trump administration.
It’s also Biden’s reality. If he had been as active throughout the final two years of his term as he’s been since becoming a lame-duck president, things might have been different.