'Subsumed into the story of Trump': How future historians may view Joe Biden

(CN) — Joe Biden will leave office next Monday as a one-term president with a historically low approval rating and a party angry at him for losing the White House and Congress. But decades from now, when passions have cooled, what will be the verdict of history?

As only the second U.S. president to be sandwiched between someone else’s non-consecutive terms, Biden will be remembered less in his own right than as a part of the larger narrative of Donald Trump, many presidential historians believe.

“Historians have a tendency to attach ‘ages’ to certain presidents,” explained David Gellman, a historian at DePauw University. “There’s the age of Jackson, the age of FDR, and the age of Reagan. But no one will write a book called ‘The Age of Biden’ unless they’re going for the irony.

“It might, however, be plausible to talk about the age of Trump, since he represents a profound break with American political tradition, which is how you get an age named after you. I can almost guarantee that Biden’s administration will be subsumed into the story of Trump. He’ll be a character in Trump’s story, not the other way around.”

Biden’s legacy “changed dramatically on November 5th” agreed David Greenberg, a historian at Rutgers who has published books on Richard Nixon and Calvin Coolidge.

In retrospect, Biden will likely be viewed as a “respite” from the chaos and disruption caused by Trump’s overturning long-established political norms, rebranding the once-staid Republican Party as a rowdy working-class juggernaut and upending the post-WWII international order, said Russell Riley, a presidential scholar at the Miller Center at the University of Virginia.

And “it could turn out to be profoundly important to have had this Biden interlude,” Riley said, noting that during the New Deal era, FDR was acutely aware that the American people could only endure so much extreme change at once.

“Public psychology [cannot] be attuned for long periods of time to a constant repetition of the highest note on the scale,” FDR warned his aides.

“When we look back, we’ll see Biden’s presidency as fundamentally more decent, law-abiding and tranquil than the bookend years of Trump,” said Stacy Cordery of Iowa State University, author of two books on the Roosevelt family.

Certain aspects of Biden’s presidency may come to be viewed more favorably in hindsight than by the current electorate simply because they will take a while to bear fruit. “One-term presidents are unpopular when they leave, but they can later be seen as more successful and far-sighted,” said Matthew Dallek of George Washington University, who has published books on FDR and Reagan.

With infrastructure projects, “we know the cost and the disruption, but you can’t yet see the benefits,” said Riley. Dallek pointed to Biden’s work on computer-chip manufacturing, reinvigorating NATO and climate change.

But Biden is also likely to be remembered for his association with the issues that were his downfall — inflation, immigration and certain “woke” ideas.

His fatal mistake was that “he won a close election and then treated it as a mandate for far-left policies,” said Robert Kaufman of Pepperdine University, who has written books on the foreign policy of George W. Bush and Barack Obama.

But not everyone agrees. “There was a lot of woke virtue-signaling from the White House,” said Greenberg, and “that was bad, but it was hardly the central fact of his presidency.” Greenberg notes that Biden was notably centrist with regard to NATO, Ukraine, Israel, infrastructure, the CHIPS bill and child tax credits.

“I don’t think Biden misread his mandate. I think on a few big issues, notably immigration and inflation, he and his aides misread the problem. But his values remained those of the average Democrat.”

Biden’s history in the Senate showed that he was never an ideologue and tended simply to follow the direction of the party, said Andrew Smith of the University of New Hampshire, the author of a history of the New Hampshire primary.

But Biden’s stumbles on key issues — and his failure to win re-election — will weigh heavily on his legacy. “Single-term presidents tend to be put in the category of losers,” said Riley. “The great marker of presidential success is serving a second term. The question is, will anything move Biden out of the ‘losers’ category?”

It’s certainly possible for presidents who were unpopular when they left office to be rehabilitated by history. Harry Truman, for instance, had an approval rating below 30% when he retired. And Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter and the first President Bush are all remembered somewhat more fondly now than when they were first turned out of office.

But the rehabilitation project is often helped by aides and party associates who want to burnish the reputation of their boss, Kaufman noted — and Biden might not benefit from that because his party is angry at him for not stepping aside earlier.

Biden at this point “is almost a party pariah,” Kaufman said. “Who’s going to stake their career on defending his legacy?”

And some people eager to distance themselves from his administration might play into Republican attempts to mire Biden in scandal. “He won’t have a lot of people holding up his good name,” said Smith, citing Mark Zuckerberg’s recent claims that Biden aides pressured Facebook to censor accurate information.

Most historians don’t think the supposed scandals will much affect Biden’s legacy, although “his pardon of his son ensured that the son’s tawdry behavior would stick to Joe too,” said Greenberg.

Smith agreed about the pardon. “He lied about it,” he said, which “makes it look like the fix was in and he used the power of the presidency for his own gain.”

Some presidents have improved their reputation after leaving office; Carter engaged in humanitarian work and Nixon wrote books on public policy. But Biden “is a very old man, and he won’t have the benefit of an admirable post-presidential life,” said Riley.

In the end, Biden’s age — and his refusal to step aside in spite of it — may become the defining “thumbnail image” that history remembers him by.

“If he had stepped aside, regardless of what happened, his reputation would be rosier,” said Gellman. “He’d have gotten a lot of credit.”

Kaufman said Biden would have been seen as a hero. “Even if Trump won, he’d be remembered as the one Democrat who could beat him," he said.

But even if Biden had opted to pass the torch, his advanced age would still be seen as limiting his achievements.

“He didn’t have the public presence to be a strong leader, due to his age,” said Greenberg.

“If he had been an effective communicator, things could have turned out differently. George W. Bush, Obama and Clinton all made mistakes, but they were able to come back. If Biden had been more effective, he might have, too.”

Gellman added that “in the last half of his term, he wasn’t a communicator even by Biden standards. He couldn’t embody the qualities that people liked about him.”

Dallek said Biden’s debate performance in June “will be the most iconic moment” that people remember. “That was a real turning point in the country’s history.”

It was “a stunning historical moment,” said Gellman. “It defined his presidency despite many accomplishments.”

And it was a moment that greased Trump’s path to victory. Although historians generally think that Biden will be viewed more kindly by history than he is in current polls — Cordery thinks he could ultimately rank as one of the country’s better presidents — his failure to defeat Trump means that he will forever be defined not on his own terms, but in the context of the man he defeated once but couldn’t defeat again.

The Trumpian era “will be remembered as consequential far more than Biden will be remembered as consequential,” said Greenberg.

For Smith, Biden “won’t exactly be an afterthought, but he won’t be seen as transformative or having changed the direction of the U.S. or our position in the world."

And that’s true whether Trump ultimately succeeds or fails. “If Trump fails, it won’t help Biden; people will blame Biden for Trump,” said Kaufman. “Biden is damned if Trump does well and damned if Trump does badly.”