As Joe Biden leaves office, he insists that his presidency has been, by and large, successful in delivering for the American people. Biden’s view is that he saved the country from disaster, but his accomplishments were not appreciated. In his mind, he spent his time nobly working on fixing the country and did not think about the grubby public relations aspect of politics. “I'm not a very good huckster… I almost spent too much time on the policy, not enough time on the politics,” he told MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell. His error, then, was that he was too pure for this world, too humble a public servant. James Clyburn, a leading Biden defender, similarly says that “I defy anybody to show me an administration that has been more impactful on the general public than Biden has been since, I suspect, Lyndon Johnson.”

 If Biden has been “impactful on the general public,” the public themselves do not seem to recognize it. His average approval rating has been the second-lowest among post-World War II presidents, with only Donald Trump being lower. Under Biden, favorable views of the Democratic Party have dropped to an all-time low. But for Biden and his defenders, public perception is out of sync with the objective facts; the American people are simply wrong, and don’t know what’s good for them.

So how should we assess Biden’s presidency? What will his legacy be? Is it true, as White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre says, that it will just “take a little bit of time” for Americans to see how impactful Biden has been? Or will history see him as a failure who was responsible for untold misery and destruction, both at home and abroad, and whose time in office only ended up strengthening the political right? 

Whatever we may say about his policy record, Joe Biden has long been delusional in evaluating his capabilities as a leader. We now know that throughout his presidency, Biden was suffering from age-related cognitive decline that his aides carefully worked to conceal from the public by limiting his appearances and carefully scripting them. Early last year, a Democratic senator told political scientist Larry Sabato that Biden “couldn’t even function” in a meeting, and was “not going to be our nominee.” Biden, however, refused to recognize how unrealistic it was for him to serve a second term, and his team thwarted any possibility of a competitive primary. Even when a catastrophic debate performance made it clear to the entire country that Joe Biden was not capable of functioning effectively as president, Biden remained stubbornly convinced that he was fine, and only dropped out of the race when the evaporation of his donor base made it clear he had no other option. (Nevertheless, Biden spun this essentially involuntary decision as a magnanimous choice to pass the torch to the next generation.) To this day, Biden holds the outlandish belief that he could have beaten Donald Trump if he had been given the opportunity, even though internal polls from the time showed him losing more than 400 electoral votes. 

A central fact of Biden’s presidency, then, irrespective of one’s views on the Inflation Reduction Act or the American Rescue Plan, is that while Biden had indicated during the 2020 campaign that he did not intend to run for a second time, he arrogantly refused to recognize his own limitations. Even as his behavior became more and more embarrassing, and he had to shield himself from the public, he doubled down and insisted that serving until the age of 86 was realistic. By insisting on being the nominee, Biden prevented a primary that could have yielded a stronger successor than Kamala Harris. Biden’s stubborn refusal to acknowledge reality, then, is a substantial reason why Donald Trump is now the president of the United States again. Truly, it was unforgivable for Biden to cling so desperately to power—an act of selfishness and vanity on par with Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s insistence on remaining in office up until the moment of her death, which paved the way for a conservative majority and the stripping away of women’s constitutional right to reproductive freedom. 

Biden’s inability to provide active, confidence-inspiring leadership may be a major part of the reason for the disconnect between his policies and his public image. It is difficult to see how any president who is (correctly) perceived as feeble and absent could succeed in winning public acclaim, even if their policies were stellar. Biden touts a long list of purported achievements, but he has been unable to communicate effectively with the American people about any of it. He should have recognized this early on and made it clear he would not run for re-election. He didn’t.

What of those policies, though? Well, on foreign policy, Biden has been a disaster, leaving the world mired in new conflicts and facing the threat of even worse wars to come. Early on, he wisely decided to withdraw the U.S. military from Afghanistan, ending a war that prior presidents knew could not succeed but did not want to admit defeat over. This was hardly a noble or commendable decision, because it was not done out of respect for the interests of the people of Afghanistan. Indeed, Biden showed how little he cared about Afghans by betraying those who had helped the U.S. and plunging the country into starvation and crisis through aggressive sanctions. He even stole more than $7 billion of Afghanistan’s central bank funds as an act of collective punishment on his way out, reserving half of it for the families of American 9/11 victims. (Theft in broad daylight, of course, is called “seizure” or “confiscation” when the United States does it.) The withdrawal was long overdue, but it was also the decision of an executive who recognizes a bad investment and does not wish to throw good money after bad. 

Meanwhile, Biden’s other most consequential foreign policy decisions have been indefensible. He has been praised for organizing NATO countries to defend Ukraine after the Russian invasion, but Biden in fact eschewed possible opportunities for diplomatic resolutions to the conflict, both before and after the invasion, playing a dangerous game of nuclear Russian roulette with Vladimir Putin while ultimately leaving Ukraine much worse off than it might have been if the U.S. had tried to bring the warring parties to the negotiating table. Biden did not undo some of Trump’s worst acts, continuing the U.S. on the path to conflict with China, supporting dictatorships like Saudi Arabia (which Biden previously said, correctly, should be a “pariah” on the world stage), maintaining Trump’s sadistic sanctions against Cuba until the last few days of his presidency, and refusing to reopen nuclear deal negotiations with Iran, which has brought us closer than ever to direct war.

But Gaza will overshadow everything else about Biden’s foreign policy, and about his presidency as a whole. After the Oct. 7, 2023 attacks on Israel, Biden committed himself to fully supporting Israel in its war of retaliation, even as Israeli leaders were intimating to him that the model for their Gaza strategy was Hiroshima or Dresden. As Israel’s indiscriminate attacks on Gaza pounded the region’s entire infrastructure to bits and killed tens of thousands of people in unfathomably gruesome ways, Biden continued to send billions of dollars of U.S. weaponry. Israel flagrantly thumbed its nose at the U.S. whenever it tried to impose “red lines” or minimal conditions, but Biden declined to use U.S. leverage to rein in Israel even as Palestinian deaths climbed into the tens of thousands. 

Major human rights organizations have since described Israel’s assault as outright genocidal, but Biden used U.S. power to thwart ceasefire proposals at the United Nations and falsely suggested Palestinian death counts weren’t credible. Instead of supporting the International Criminal Court as it tried to investigate potential acts of genocide in Gaza, Biden attacked the court’s effort to enforce international law as “outrageous.” Even as officials in Biden’s State Department were warning that Israel’s human rights abuses meant that U.S. aid to Israel was in direct violation of U.S. law, Biden’s Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, preferred to lie to Congress rather than comply with the law—and Biden let him do it without the slightest punishment. 

Throughout this time, Biden pretended to be working to broker a ceasefire deal between Israel and Hamas, while in reality being totally committed to supporting Israel’s choice to wage indefinite war. In particular, one sequence of events from May 2024 ought to be remembered as a shameful failure on his part. In that month, Hamas agreed to halt its military operations and release the Israeli hostages it was holding in exchange for the release of Palestinian prisoners, the withdrawal of Israeli troops from Gaza, and an eventual permanent ceasefire. The Biden administration came out in favor of the deal, but Netanyahu publicly torpedoed it, insisting upon his impossible objective of “total victory” over Hamas. 

Days later, Biden stated that if Netanyahu were to invade the city of Rafah—an incursion that Biden’s advisers said would lead to massive numbers of civilian casualties—it would cross a “red line.” He said plainly that “If they go into Rafah… I’m not supplying the weapons that have been used historically.” But Israel ignored Biden’s warning and proceeded with a full- scale invasion—and Biden responded, not by imposing any penalty, but by approving another $1 billion weapons delivery. He caved in completely, and demonstrated to the world that his word means nothing. As a result, IDF soldiers would commit some of the most horrific massacres of the entire bloody war and force hundreds of thousands of people to flee once more.

Israel, likewise, faced no punishment from Biden for tanking the ceasefire talks. Instead, Biden feigned helplessness, and the press helped him do it, dutifully pumping out stories about how he was “deeply concerned” about the senseless destruction of civilian life or how he was hopping mad at Netanyahu’s total obstinacy. Even worse, ostensible leftists like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez played along, repeating Biden and Harris’s line about how they were supposedly “working tirelessly to secure a ceasefire.” But this narrative, which always rang hollow, became totally untenable over the past week, when Netanyahu suddenly agreed to a deal that is functionally identical to the one that he ripped up in May. As of Sunday, “the guns have fallen silent in Gaza” according to Biden. Displaced Gazans have begun migrating back to their ruined homes, and three Israeli hostages have been released.  

Biden has attempted to take credit for this last-minute peace agreement. But it’s clear from reports in the Israeli press that the real factor that brought about change was not Biden’s negotiating team, but the one sent by incoming President Trump, who has been insistent on the war wrapping up before he takes office. According to Haaretz, the person who was most instrumental in getting the gears moving was Steve Witkoff, a relatively unknown real estate developer who Trump tapped as his Middle East envoy despite Witkoff having no diplomatic experience. Israeli negotiators described him as “just some guy sent by Trump,” but said that by the time he was done meeting with the prime minister, “Bibi had no choice but to say yes very quickly.” 

In the following days, there have been good reasons to doubt the longevity of this ceasefire agreement, which is slated to last for six weeks. According to Israeli media, Trump has assured Netanyahu in private that “he will support Israel retroactively if it decides to return to fighting and violate the ceasefire.” Trump’s incoming national security adviser Mike Waltz said as much publicly on Fox News, telling Israel that “If they need to go back in, we’re with them.” So we should not credit Trump as some grand peacemaker. But the fact remains that he and some real estate guy he plucked from obscurity have managed to do something within a matter of weeks that Biden failed and his team of negotiators refused to do for more than a year: actually put substantial pressure on Israel to do what they wanted.

Trump is pretty clearly doing this to serve his own self-interest, rather than any sort of affinity for the Palestinian cause. (Remember, this is the same man who uses the word “Palestinian” as a slur for his opponents and has threatened to deport pro-Palestine protesters.) But it would have served Biden and his party’s interests to secure a ceasefire at any point over the past year, too. In fact, it’s looking increasingly possible that not doing so cost Kamala Harris the election. A new poll released this past week found that for 29 percent of those who voted for Biden in 2020 but refused to vote for Harris, Gaza was the number one reason—more than immigration or the economy. 

The Biden administration could have ended the slaughter in May, when this very same deal was right in front of them. And the fact that Trump was able to come in and immediately force a deal on Netanyahu shows he could have ended it at any other time as well. He always had a choice. He chose the destruction of an entire community, its schools, hospitals, mosques, and colleges. His record is thousands of children’s mangled corpses. It’s the obliteration of entire families, entire neighborhoods. It’s complicity in one of the worst crimes against humanity in our century. As a result, Biden has more than earned himself the nickname “Genocide Joe.”

It’s oddly appropriate that Representative Clyburn chose to compare Biden to Lyndon Johnson, because both presidents are responsible for a heinous atrocity abroad: Johnson’s in Vietnam, Biden’s in Gaza. When that’s the case, it is difficult to even speak about their domestic agenda. How does one balance an infrastructure bill against a genocide? But Biden’s domestic agenda doesn’t compare in any way with Johnson’s “Great Society.” Indeed, many of Biden’s highly touted achievements are at least partially fraudulent. Biden was dubbed the “most pro-labor president since FDR” for symbolic actions like visiting a United Auto Workers picket line, and his National Labor Relations Board did some important work to restore and enhance workers’ right to unionize—but despite all that, unionization rates actually continued to decline during his term. He also used the power of the presidency to prohibit a railway strike in 2022, and Kamala Harris refused to promise the Teamsters union that she wouldn’t break other strikes if elected, costing the Democrats an important endorsement. Likewise, Biden boasts of signing “first major gun safety law in nearly 30 years,” but that law was weak and did little to restrict access to the most deadly weapons. Biden touts a strong economy, but that economy also saw rising homelessness, rising inequality, and rising hunger. The 2020s are becoming a Second Gilded Age, and he’s done far too little to stop it. 

One of the most dramatic failures of Biden’s tenure, though, is on the climate crisis, which has been thrown into sharp relief this month by the catastrophic wildfires in Los Angeles. Biden  portrays himself as having substantially advanced the fight against climate change, and he did take a number of climate measures, including halting development on the notorious Keystone XL pipeline and placing new limits on oil and gas drilling in Alaska. But he did not oppose the production and consumption of fossil fuels with anywhere near the forcefulness the planet’s current emergency requires. In fact, under his watch the United States drilled more oil than it did under Trump, with production reaching a record 13.2 million barrels in October 2023 compared to Trump’s peak of 13.0 million barrels. Just two years after shutting down the Keystone XL project, he approved further development on the equally awful Mountain Valley Pipeline, which protesters in Appalachia have chained themselves to machinery in an attempt to stop. 

Biden’s signature climate bill, the Inflation Reduction Act, was a massive handout to oil and gas companies. It guaranteed further drilling on public land and promoted “carbon capture” technology—which doesn’t work very well and can cause deadly CO2 leaks—as a viable climate solution, which only delays real solutions from being enacted. His transportation secretary, Pete Buttigieg, also approved the Sea Port Oil Terminal (SPOT), a mammoth pumping station that industry magazines describe as the “largest of its kind in the United States,” capable of loading “two million barrels of crude oil per day” into supertanker ships for export. In October 2023 a group of young climate protesters crashed a Buttiegieg event with a banner dubbing him “Petro Pete,” and in doing so they showed more courage and initiative than either Buttigieg or Biden himself ever did. Biden even bragged about all this, saying in August 2024 that he had “responsibly increased our oil production to meet our immediate needs” while still believing in a “transition to green energy,” and claimed that the United States “can do both.” But, in fact, you cannot both burn yourself and save yourself from burning, and climate scientist Peter Kalmus accurately called Biden’s both-sides approach “horrifying.” Meanwhile, the other biggest contributor to climate change—animal agriculture and factory farming—has gone almost entirely unaddressed.

Another of Biden’s supposed achievements, listed as a bullet point in his farewell statement, is simply a lie: “Ending the COVID-19 Pandemic.” As anyone who works in retail, food service, or any other public-facing job knows, the pandemic did not end. It continues to sicken, hospitalize, and even kill people today, and the number of infections spiked again in December. Biden’s decision to go on 60 Minutes and declare that “the pandemic is over” in September 2022, when 400 people a day were still dying, is among the most despicable things he’s done in his long career. It’s matched only by his decision to shorten the quarantine time for infected workers from 10 days to 5 after the CEO of Delta Airlines demanded it of him, and his later decision to have the CDC eliminate self-isolation time altogether in March 2024, with the agency declaring that COVID was “no longer the emergency that it once was.” Both moves forced people to go back to work while they were still sick, and they almost certainly led to preventable deaths, all so corporations could keep their “human capital stock” under control and their profit margins up. In an effort to score a cheap political win by “ending” the pandemic, Biden has thrown working people directly into the path of the virus, and for that he can never be forgiven. 

Meanwhile, many of Biden’s real accomplishments were technocratic and invisible to ordinary people. For instance, Lina Khan’s trust-busting as head of the Federal Trade Commission earned plaudits from anti-monopolists, and it’s easy to see why some of its actions may make meaningful differences, like blocking the merger of Kroger and Albertsons or pursuing Big Pharma for patent abuse that keeps drugs expensive. Others are more difficult for people to see as meaningful improvements. How much does the average American care whether Lockheed Martin successfully acquires Aerojet, or Sanofi acquires Maze Therapeutics? Other actions have yet to pay off. For instance, the FTC’s pursuit of Pharmacy Benefit Managers is long overdue, but nothing the Biden administration has done about them has yet impacted people in a real way. And while Biden brags that under his administration, “More people have health insurance in America today than ever before,” what most people experience is ever-rising healthcare costs that are still out of control, and a system that is broken to its core. When people are underpaid and overworked, when they see homelessness exploding in their city, a worsening climate crisis, and billions of dollars being funneled into the arms industry, telling them that the economy is wonderful and Biden is helping them feels like a cruel act of gaslighting.

Joe Biden should never have been president. Really, he shouldn’t even have been vice president. His career in the Senate was a disgrace, in which he distinguished himself as a servant of corporate interests, a cruel advocate of mass incarceration, a buddy of racists like segregationist Strom Thurmond, and a serial liar. He only became the 2020 nominee because centrists needed someone to block the expected nomination of Bernie Sanders, and they coalesced behind Biden while progressives were still split between Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. Biden ran a weak campaign and only just squeaked into office, despite the fact that Trump had exacerbated a disastrous pandemic and was historically unpopular. If the now hugely popular Sanders had been the 2020 victor, the United States might have had a chance to build an authentic social democracy that cared for its citizens basic needs. Biden almost singlehandedly ensured that wouldn’t happen. He kept his promise to his rich donors, even as he betrayed everyone else: that “no one’s standard of living will change, nothing would fundamentally change.”

In his memoir Promises to Keep, Biden wrote that “A person’s epitaph was written when his or her last battle was fought.” If we keep his words in mind, the outgoing president’s epitaph was written in November 2024, when Donald Trump cruised to victory over Biden, Kamala Harris, and the entire Democratic electoral coalition. As Mehdi Hasan recently wrote for the Guardian, Biden had one job: “to defeat Donald Trump and end the threat he posed to our democracy.” That was the standard he set for himself, in endless and increasingly nauseating speeches about the “soul of the nation,” “character,” and “decency”—as if he knew what those words meant, as the bombs continued to drop on Gaza. And by his own standards, Biden failed utterly. 

It didn’t have to be this way. But ultimately, Joe Biden created the conditions for Trump to come back stronger and more popular than ever, becoming the first Republican president of the 21st century to win the popular vote. This is what, in 2020, this magazine warned would happen. Biden has made major unforced errors, like signing a TikTok ban that allowed Trump to position himself as the platform’s savior. The decision to use presidential pardon power to exempt his son from legal consequences for his actions—along with, today, several other members of his family—made Biden look deeply unprincipled, especially because he had previously promised not to pardon Hunter and he falsely accused prosecutors of waging a political prosecution. But more fundamentally, Biden failed to solve any of the major challenges facing the United States and its people, from healthcare to education to the rent being too damn high. His unqualified support for the slaughter in Gaza is a moral stain that will overshadow nearly everything else, especially as the full scope of the destruction becomes clear. On the whole, there is little to praise about a president who has been so ineffectual at inspiring the country, so deceptive about his condition, and so committed to supporting heinous atrocities abroad. He gave the American people no reason to believe anything he said, let alone vote for him or Kamala Harris. Today, as Trump is inaugurated for a second time, every wave of applause is Joe Biden’s legacy.