In just a few weeks, Joe Biden will depart the Oval Office for the last time with a legacy featuring more highs and lows than perhaps any president in modern American history.
From an economic policy standpoint, Biden’s presidency was remarkably successful. When he took office in January 2021, he inherited an economy that was in free fall, battered and bruised from the Covid pandemic. He helped engineer a “soft landing” generally considered among the best in the world.
In his four years in office, 16 million new jobs were created — the most of any single presidential term, including a significant increase in manufacturing jobs. The unemployment rate fell to the lowest in 50 years. Wage growth increased, particularly among the working class, and a record 20 million applications for new businesses have been filed since Biden took office.
From a policy standpoint, Biden arguably ranks among the best one-term presidents.
From a legislative standpoint, Biden signed into law several major bills, including a nearly $1 trillion infrastructure bill and the Inflation Reduction Act. The latter included nearly $400 billion to mitigate the impacts of climate change, the largest such investment any country has ever made. The IRA additionally enabled Medicare to negotiate — and subsequently reduce — drug prices. Biden also signed the CHIPS Act, which provided more than $50 billion in spending to boost the U.S. semiconductor industry, and the first gun safety legislation in decades.
As for foreign policy, Biden finally ended the U.S. war in Afghanistan and assembled a global coalition to challenge the Russian invasion of Ukraine. While there are legitimate criticisms of his handling of the war in Gaza, he played a key role in preventing a larger and more deadly regional conflict.
From a policy standpoint, Biden arguably ranks among the best one-term presidents — certainly behind James Polk, who pushed the country’s westward expansion, but ahead of the likes of William Howard Taft, John Adams or George H.W. Bush. (In fairness, the lion’s share of one-term presidents have been either mediocre or bad, which is one of the reasons why they didn’t win re-election.)
But presidents are not judged by policy accomplishments alone. When it comes to proposing and signing legislation that transformed America, few presidents can hold a candle to Lyndon Johnson. But politically, he was a disaster who divided and arguably enfeebled the Democratic Party (at the presidential level) for a generation to come.
Biden’s political record may come to define his legacy — and not in a good way.
When he took office, Biden was viewed favorably by most voters. But by the fall of 2021, after the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan, his approval ratings went south — and never recovered.
A major reason were the inflation woes that undermined incumbent parties around the world. But Biden doesn’t get off the hook that easily. Even at his best, Biden is a mediocre communicator and, while he convinced 81 million Americans to vote for him in 2020 — he was never able to build the same type of political support as president. Though inflation began to recede in 2023 and 2024 and the economy improved, it didn’t translate into better poll numbers for Biden. His supporters will blame the media, congressional Republicans or even bad luck for Biden’s inability to win over the electorate or convince them that things in the country were improving. But the presidential bully pulpit is a powerful tool, and Biden failed to use it effectively.
Biden’s legacy is further tarnished by questions about his age and his decision to seek re-election.
His legislative accomplishments may stand the test of time. Two years ago, one could argue that Biden’s most significant accomplishment was unseating Donald Trump after four disastrous years in office that shook the very foundations of American democracy. Indeed, in the most recent edition of the Presidential Greatness Project, a poll of presidential experts, Biden placed 14th overall. The only one-term president to rank higher was Adams. But while Biden ousted Trump from the White House in 2021, he unquestionably contributed to Trump’s return in 2025. To be clear, it’s impossible to know if Biden dropping out of the presidential race earlier would have led to a different electoral outcome. Globally, every incumbent party lost election share in 2024. It’s quite possible that winning the presidency in 2020 was a poisoned chalice for Democrats, no matter the party’s standard bearer four years later. However, according to Professor Justin Vaughn of Coastal Carolina University, who co-directs the Presidential Greatness Project, that is not enough of a defense. Since the project conducted its most recent survey in 2023, says Vaughn, “Americans learned the extent to which the White House had been covering for his physical decline. He resisted dropping out of the race until he had no other option, he granted his son an exceptionally broad pardon (despite directly and explicitly promising not to), and essentially became a part-time president.” Ultimately, Vaughn thinks Biden’s “presidential legacy will be defined by the breaking of his promise to be a bridge to a new generation and instead serving as only an intermission between the first and second acts of the Trump Administration.” According to Margaret O’Mara, a history professor at the University of Washington, “not enough dust has settled to render a verdict” on Biden. “Yes, much accomplished of likely long-term consequence a la Polk,” she says, “and yes, choices also made (i.e., choosing to run for re-election) with significant and potentially damaging consequences to country and party, a la James Buchanan.” (Most historians place Buchanan, like Biden a one-term president, at the bottom of presidential rankings.) For Joshua Zeitz, a historian and contributing editor at Politico, we might be years away from a true assessment of Biden’s presidency since it’s impossible to say how much of his legislative accomplishments will survive Trump’s next four years in office. While Zeitz thinks Biden was an “extremely good president,” if Trump does fundamental or even irreversible damage to America’s democratic institutions, it will cast an even more negative light on Biden’s stubborn insistence on running for re-election. As Biden prepares to leave office, he can certainly take solace in leaving the country in a better place than when he entered — and his legislative accomplishments may stand the test of time. But it’s the ultimate irony that the man who coaxed Biden back into presidential politics may have the last word on the legacy of his one term in office.
Michael Cohen is an MSNBC columnist. He is also the publisher of the newsletter Truth and Consequences and hosts the weekly podcast That ‘70s Movie Podcast. 
