‘Minor president’: Biden battles to build legacy as historians downgrade his greatness

For better or worse, President Biden will go down in history as the turkey sandwiched between Donald Trump’s two slices of bread.

His claims of foreign policy gravitas and domestic spending accomplishments will forever be secondary to his ascension, which appeared to end Mr. Trump’s career, and ultimate surrender to an even more politically potent Mr. Trump four years later.

“Biden is likely to be considered a minor president, notable primarily for the tragic irony that the president who campaigned on keeping Trump from a second term ended up being one of the people most responsible for him returning to the White House,” said Justin Vaughn, a political scientist at Coastal Carolina University who co-directs the Presidential Greatness Project.

Just six months ago, the Democratic Party and many media commentators hailed Mr. Biden as the man who delivered a robust economy, rebuilt international alliances and funneled trillions of taxpayer dollars into climate change, infrastructure, and state and local governments.

Rep. Nancy Pelosi of California, who as House speaker was the architect of those legislative wins, said this summer that Mr. Biden was “a Mount Rushmore kind of president.”

Many Democrats who congratulated Mr. Biden on his withdrawal from the presidential race in July now say he ruined his legacy by waiting. He bequeathed the nomination to wounded Vice President Kamala Harris and lost Congress to the Republican Party.

For Republicans and many independents, Mr. Biden’s legacy is even worse. They point to unfathomably unsecured borders, runaway inflation that plagued his early years and gargantuan federal budget deficits he has locked in for years to come.

Mr. Biden is attempting to recalibrate his legacy with a week’s worth of events telling Americans what he thinks he got right. The high point will be a farewell address from the Oval Office on Wednesday.

He has a significant deficit to overcome.

Gallup, the venerable polling company, said a majority of Americans expect history to judge Mr. Biden as a “below average” or even “poor” president. About a quarter see him as “average,” and less than 20% say he was “above average” or “outstanding.”

Gallup said that gives him an overall net rating of -35, which is about on par with Richard Nixon’s as the worst of 11 recent presidents.

It is also worse than the -32 rating Mr. Trump scored in the same poll when he left office four years ago. Gallup said the president-elect’s standing has markedly improved to a -4 rating.

Most Republicans would never see Mr. Biden as a great or even good president, but Democrats’ changing views, based mainly on the election results, are sinking him.

Franklin Foer, a Biden biographer and writer at The Atlantic, said the loss to Mr. Trump “is his legacy.”

“Everything else is an asterisk,” Mr. Foer wrote after the November election.

Juan Williams, a historian and political analyst, said his fellow liberals are shortchanging Mr. Biden’s economic and foreign policy wins.

“The scrappy kid from Scranton made America a better place,” Mr. Williams wrote in The Hill. “Americans may find themselves longing for the Biden years. They may even ask him — or his capable vice president — to step back into the fray and save the nation once more.”

Gallup said those arguments aren’t resonating.

It used 18 yardsticks, including immigration, crime, race relations, the economy, terrorism and the U.S. standing worldwide. Americans said the U.S. lost ground over the past four years on every measure but one: rights for gay, lesbian and transgender people.

Mr. Biden figures history will treat him better than all that.

In remarks to employees at the Labor Department in December, he said it was “frustrating” not to get credit for what he considered to be his accomplishments. “So much is going on, but it’s going to take a little bit of time,” he said.

Mr. Biden entered office on a sugar high after ushering Mr. Trump into what seemed like a final political retirement. His honeymoon lasted into the summer of 2021 with a net positive approval rating of 5 percentage points, according to the RealClearPolitics.com average of polls.

That changed as his troop withdrawal in Afghanistan turned disastrous. RealClearPolitics said his approval turned negative on Aug. 23, 2021, and has never touched positive territory since.

Regardless, historians were bullish on Mr. Biden as recently as a year ago.

The Presidential Greatness Project, which annually surveys presidential historians, placed him in the top third of all time at No. 14, ahead of Ronald Reagan and Woodrow Wilson and just behind Bill Clinton and John Adams.

President Obama was ranked seventh, and President Trump was dead last.

Although this year’s survey has not been released, Mr. Vaughn, who runs the survey with a colleague, said Mr. Biden is poised for a tumble.

“Since we conducted the Presidential Greatness survey where Biden ranked 14th, several key developments that are likely to affect his presidential legacy transpired, most notably his disastrous debate performance and subsequent forced departure from the race,” Mr. Vaughn said in an email. “Trump’s ultimate victory, the broad pardon of son Hunter, and his largely invisible presidency over the last year of his administration are all developments that will adversely affect his historic reputation.”