January 23, 2025
Inheriting a post-pandemic economy, Biden orchestrated the best recovery in the industrial world.
With his characteristic dyspeptic vitriol, Donald Trump scorns Joe Biden as the “worst president in the history of America.” The historian Robert McElvaine hails him as a “great president,” arguing that his accomplishments rival those of “both Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson, the two most effective of 20th-century presidents,” and since Biden didn’t enjoy the congressional majorities of those giants, he had to do it, “as was said about Ginger Rogers doing everything that Fred Astaire could do, backwards and in high heels.”
What is clear is that after four contentious years, Biden leaves Washington as a remarkably consequential one-term president.
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As Ben Rhodes, a former Obama speechwriter noted: “Biden and Trump are really two sides of the same coin on foreign policy: their platforms—Make ‘America great again’ and ‘America is back’—both represent different flavors of nostalgia for a world that structurally cannot exist anymore.” The emerging multipolar world requires abandoning both Trump’s “aggressive nationalism” and Biden’s “missionary liberalism” in favor of something far more realistic.
History will judge whether Biden was a consequential president; instant assessments are written in the wind. Yet some conclusions seem obvious. Biden consolidated the break with the failed market fundamentalism of the conservative era that Trump began. That era is over. In contrast, Biden sought to assert America’s role as the “indispensable nation” abroad that can no longer be sustained. What comes next remains to be seen. And with Trump, a cynical, ill-informed, transactional grifter returning to the presidency, it is unlikely to be resolved any time soon.
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