Biden’s presidential legacy: an era of change, forever marked by Trump

President Biden showed up at the White House promising to be a transitional figure, and then once he got there, he began to see himself as a transformational figure. But after four tumultuous years in power, it turns out he really was neither.

Instead, Mr. Biden will end up in the history books as an interregnum between two terms of Donald J. Trump, a pause in the middle of a chaotic period of change, for better or worse. Mr. Biden had hoped to make Mr. Trump an asterisk in American history, one that would soon be forgotten. From now on, it is he who will try to defend his cause for posterity.

He will outline the matter Wednesday evening in a prime-time farewell address to the nation before leaving office on Monday. Mr. Biden has a long list of accomplishments of which he is proud, including an expanded social safety net, a revived economy, major efforts to combat climate change and reinvigorated American leadership on the world stage.

“Four years ago, we were in a winter of peril and a winter of possibility,” he said in a letter to the public released Wednesday morning ahead of the speech. “We were in the grip of the worst pandemic in a century, the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, and the worst attack on our democracy since the Civil War. But we came together as Americans and we braved this ordeal. We emerged stronger, more prosperous and more secure. »

But hobbled by inflation, illegal immigration and his own age, Mr. Biden is stepping down as an unpopular one-term president, ceding the Oval Office to a man he considers a fascist and a danger to democracy . He hopes that history will remember him more fondly than his contemporaries and, as with other presidents, that may well be the case.

However, while we wait for the historians to look at their scorecards, here is a look at the highs and lows of the Biden presidency:

COVID-19 PANDEMIC

Biden took the country out of lockdown after a wave of deaths.