As Biden ends a half-century political career, his failure to turn Trump’s page weighs heavily on the president

President Biden’s half-century long political career ends on Monday, as President-elect Trump was inaugurated and succeeds Biden in the White House.

While the longtime Democratic senator from Delaware, two-term vice president and one-term president can point to a host 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 the nation’s history.

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

In an open letter to the American people on Wednesday, Biden appeared to concede that he had failed to deliver on a sweeping promise from 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 complained “that’s still the case.”

“President Biden ran and was elected on a platform of returning to normalcy in 2020. And while voters seem to have wanted that in principle, history will remember Biden as unable to deliver on his promise,” veteran political scientist Wayne Lesperance, president of New England College, said. for 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 sought to stabilize politics at home while strengthening American leadership abroad, and as a leader who led the nation out of the COVID-19 pandemic, made historic investments in infrastructure and clean energy, jump-started the economy and made 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 of extreme wealth, power and influence is taking shape in America that literally threatens our entire democracy. Our basic rights, freedoms and fair opportunity for all to thrive.”

Biden ends his unique tenure in the White House with an approval rating that remains underwater.

He recorded 42% approval and 57% disapproval in the latter Fox News National Poll, which was conducted from January 10 to 13 and published on Thursday.

According to the latest data, only 36 percent of Americans approve of the job Biden is doing in the White House CNN Poll, which matched the president’s previous low rating in cable news polls during Biden’s tenure in the White House.

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

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

The decline in the president’s approval rating has also been fueled by skyrocketing inflation — which began rising in the summer of 2021 and remains Americans’ top pocketbook concern to this day — and a wave of migrants trying to cross into the U.S. along southern border.

Biden’s approval rating slipped in the fall of 2021 and never returned to positive territory.

The latest polls also show that many Americans view Biden’s presidency as a failure.

Sixty-one percent of adults nationwide surveyed in the CNN research they said they generally see Biden’s presidency as a failure, with 38% seeing it as a success.

According to USA Today/Suffolk University research44% of registered voters said history will judge Biden as a failed president, while 27% say he will be judged an honest president. Twenty-one percent of those surveyed said history will see Biden as a good president, while only 5% say he will be considered a great president.

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Just over a third of adults nationwide surveyed by the Marist poll said Biden would be remembered as one of the worst presidents in American history, and 19% said he would be considered a below-average president.

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

Biden, in one of his last interviews in office, told MSNBC in a sign of repentance that “ironically, he almost spent too much time on politics and not enough time on politics.”

It also weighs on Biden’s legacy — his ill-fated re-election bid.

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

Less than a month later, after an outcry from fellow Democrats, Biden announced he was ending his campaign and endorsing 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’ election failures in November.

Longtime Democratic strategist James Carville told Fox News that “the story of Joe Biden is one of the greatest tragedies of American politics. I really mean it. He should have a glorious, well-deserved, highly praised retirement. And he doesn’t.”

And Carville, the political mastermind behind former President Bill Clinton’s historic victory in the White House in 1992, said it was “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 is going to look pretty good because of some of the legislation he’s been able to push through,” John MacNeil, a longtime Democratic consultant and Biden supporter, told Fox News. “The fruits of some of what Biden has accomplished will only become apparent in the next few years.”

But MacNeil, the founding director of Unite the Country, a super PAC that boosted the then-former vice president in the 2020 Democratic primary, also acknowledged that Biden “could just be seen as a hiccup between Trump One and Trump Two. That’s something about what historians will talk about.”