Joe Biden was a Bad President

The fact that he was bookended by even worse doesn't let him off the hook.

Every so often, political historians are polled to come up with a ranking of the presidents. That might sound like the preamble to a Buzzfeed listicle, but historian Arthur Schlesinger — himself an obsequious sycophant to the Kennedy administration — conducted one all the way back in 1948. It’s a fairly old game.

I took another look at the rankings on the occasion of Jimmy Carter’s death earlier this month. I have argued that he is one of the most underrated presidents because he presided over a wave of federal deregulation that transformed the US economy for the better over the next thirty years, yet he was still sandwiched at #27 between mid-lights Grover Cleveland and James Garfield. (Although the most recent poll shows a slight improvement.) I’d place him in the top ten.

Where to rank Biden? Carter is a reminder that it takes time to truly see the impact of a presidency; the seeds he sowed only bore full fruit years and decades later. So by necessarily this is a first take that ought to be continuously revised.

But, as you could no doubt tell from my title, I would rank Biden fairly low. Out of the 46 presidents, I’d place him no higher than the low 30s. That keeps him out of the cellar, the bottom tier of presidents responsible for either existential threats to American democracy and/or massive loss of life in unnecessary wars, the likes of Richard Nixon, George W. Bush, Andrew Johnson, James Buchanan, and, yes, Donald Trump. (The exact order at the scum-sucking bottom of the barrel is negotiable.)

Indeed, that was Biden’s greatest accomplishment: simply not being Donald Trump. Biden did not try to overturn an election nor did he launch an insurrection. And for all that Biden was a bad president, he managed to prevent an unbroken eight years of an even worse president. That’s worth something, although I’m afraid I’m damning him with faint praise. Here’s a gold star for not trying to end the American experiment, whoopee.

Even so, as an administrator, policymaker, and politician, Biden was a failure.

At this point, Biden’s mental decline is no secret. He had a clear pattern of sundowning, an inability to speak coherently, and a growing absence from the campaign trail, interviews, or press conferences. But in and of itself wasn’t the problem. After all, we’ve had mentally impaired presidents before that managed to keep the engine of state running smoothly regardless: Reagan (Alzheimers) and Wilson (strokes).

The problem was that Biden’s incompetence meant that executive power ended up being wielded by the equivalent of three Elizabeth Warren staffers in a trench coat. While the desiccated husk of Joe Biden was wheeled out for public statements every now and again, actual policymaking power was functionally turned over to a small group of progressive activists and interest groups.¹

This explains the Biden administration’s fixation on a variety of unpopular policies, such as his fixation on forgiving student loans. It was an issue that played well with progressive DC staffers burdened with small salaries and a mountain of debt from their freshly-printed college degrees, but it polled poorly with the general public and independent voters. It is strange that a first term president seeking reelection would have made this perhaps his single most salient policy issue, something which popped up repeatedly throughout his term. Heck, it was one of his final policy actions before leaving office!²

I doubt, however, that student loan forgiveness will be a defining feature of Biden’s legacy any more than George W. Bush’s far more sweeping action on student loans — making the debt non-dischargeable and inflating the current lending bubble — is primarily what we think about when we rank him.³

Happily, we can judge Biden on his own terms. Biden wanted the policy tentpole of his legacy to be the Inflation Reduction Act. It was meant to stake his claim as the rightful, progressive heir of the Great Society and New Deal. It would buoy a full employment economic recovery, rebuild our crumbling public infrastructure, and fuel the renewable energy transition.

But it was a mistake, a boondoggle. It was also a political disaster and arguably contributed to Trump’s victory in 2024.

The problem was that Biden allowed nostalgia for an imagined past to cloud his policy prescriptions. He acted as if 2022 was 1932. That meant thinking that further demand-side stimulus was the ticket to economic recovery and that the way to accomplish this goal was via full employment. Put enough money in people’s pockets, they’ll buy more goods and services, and companies will hire more workers to fulfill that demand, or so the logic went.

But by the summer of 2022, America no longer had an unemployment problem, which had been a temporary artifact of pandemic restrictions two years prior. And earlier rounds of economic stimulus had led to both a wave of consumer spending and early signs of inflation. To be fair, many progressive economists pooh-poohed warnings of runaway inflation and encouraged Biden to keep the money spigots open and spray cash on a variety of wish listed progressive projects. It was bad advice.

While the Inflation Reduction Act was reasonably effective at increasing inflation, it was not very effective at accomplishing its more tangible goals. Take green energy infrastructure, for example. The IRA earmarked $7.5 billion to install hundreds of thousands of electric vehicle charging stations. Two years later, you could count how many of these new, federally-funded chargers had been added on two hands: EIGHT.

The reason for the failure was mission creep, or what NYT podcaster Ezra Klein calls “everything bagel liberalism.” It wasn’t enough to spend billions on new chargers, no; the law also needed to make sure those chargers were installed only by unionized workers, that the component parts be made only in America, and that the chargers’ locations satisfy a complicated set of equity requirements.

This failure was compounded by Biden falling into another besetting sin of contemporary progressive policymaking: an obsession with subsidizing demand while restricting supply. You might have seen the meme.

The IRA subsidized demand in two ways; the chargers — which theoretically would reduce the time and monetary cost of charging — while adding a direct $7,500 tax credit for EV vehicle purchases. Like with the chargers, this credit was larded with additional, unnecessary requirements. To qualify, the vehicles had to be assembled domestically using certain percentages of components also manufactured in the United States.

As a result, at this point only fifteen vehicles qualify under these made-in-America rules, the most egregious of which is the $100k Tesla Cybertruck. This was supposed to be the pathway to a sustainable, electric future for all Americans, not a subsidy for well-off tech bros searching for a way to loudly signal their status as a recent divorcee.

But at the same time as the administration subsidized EV demand, they ramped up restrictions on supply. Normally, if your goal was to immanentize the electric eschaton, so to speak, you’d want to encourage the most price-conscious consumers to switch from their gas guzzlers. That means targeting affordable, entry level cars for greater supply.

However, the global reality is that the cheapest EVs are made in China. Companies like BYD are manufacturing cars that are more advanced than US-made models and yet retail for a fraction of the price. For example, the BYD Seagull retails for just over $10k, which is nearly a third the price of the cheapest EV in America, the Nissan Leaf. In exchange for paying an additional $20k more, you get 100 miles less range. What a steal.

If international EV manufacturers were allowed to sell their vehicles in America on a level playing field, they would demolish the competition. In short order, US sales of EVs and hybrids — 19% of sales last year — would start looking like Chinese demand, which passed 50%. That’s…a good thing. That was ostensibly the goal of the administration’s entire suite of EV policies!

But, once again, everything bagel liberalism rears its head. Biden is an old school, hardhat progressive, afflicted with misguided nostalgia for a mid-20th century American economy powered by manufacturing and a Democratic politics that catered to labor unions. He only wants a new energy future as long as it also turns the political economic clock back a century.

And so, at the behest of both domestic automobile manufacturers and union bosses — a rare moment of rent-seeking unity between capital and labor — he slapped massive tariffs on Chinese imports, including a 100% tariff on EVs, 25% on batteries, and 50% on solar cells. This won’t really work long term; the arbitrage is just too large; already, manufacturers are looking to exploit loopholes by assembling in Mexico.

But it is delaying electric vehicle adoption in the US, which badly lags the global average and puts us behind countries like Costa Rica and Thailand. We’ve got the vehicular profile of a much poorer country, and that’s partly thanks to tariffs enacted by both the Trump and Biden administrations. Remember, the core point of these policies was to boost EV adoption! But the net effect has been to delay it. It’s an abject failure of policy design, implementation, and effect, all three.

I’ve spent quite a lot of space discussing EV policy, not because it was the most important part of Biden’s policy agenda, but because it was an exemplar of his broader failures as a policymaker. His policy vision was rooted in nostalgia for a past to which there is no return. His policies were so larded with secondary goals that they couldn’t achieve liftoff. His policy agenda was frequently self-contradictory and had null impact.

You can spot these failures cropping up throughout Biden’s policy agenda, and they contributed to the administration’s failure to actually accomplish much of anything. I suspect, when historians look back, they’ll find few durable policy accomplishments. To the extent that progress was made, it was frequently a product of long-running trends rather than anything specifically done by his administration.

I’ve gone on too long, so I’ll run much too quickly through Biden’s day one agenda:

• Despite rules directing infrastructure spending towards unions, and tariffs on foreign imports, the share of unionized workers continued to tick down throughout the Biden administration, reaching a historic low of 10% in 2023.

• America made progress on its contribution to climate change, but our downward trend in carbon emissions has been steady since 2000.

• Biden achieved no major policy reforms in healthcare or immigration.

• His foreign policy was a mixed bag of the good (Ukraine), the bad (Gaza), and the ugly (Afghanistan).

To repeat, by his own terms, the Biden administration was a failure. And he paid a political price for it. As many have noted, inflation was the single most commonly cited reason by voters in 2024, with those mentioning it breaking decisively for Trump. This was part of a general global pattern of voters punishing incumbent parties — with little regard for ideology — for inflation. Ordinary Americans hate inflation and blamed Biden for it.

That wasn’t entirely unfair. In an alternate universe, Biden doesn’t make his first policy priority issuing the third — and the largest — round of stimulus checks (with a cool $1.9 trillion price tag). In that universe, inflation spikes lower, peaks sooner, and falls faster. That would likely have improved his or Harris’ electoral prospects in 2024.

As it stands, fair or unfair, this is the single policy area most likely to endure in the public memory about Joe Biden decades from now. People won’t remember Afghanistan, EV chargers, student loan forgiveness, etcetera. They’ll just remember the doddering old man responsible for their eggs costing more than $5 per dozen.⁴ Both nature and politics are red in tooth and claw.

To return to where we started, the juxtaposition of Carter’s death and Biden’s retirement less than a month apart is fitting because both were single term presidents forced to confront quite similar problems. The late-1970s were a period of economic doldrums and runaway inflation far in excess of the 2020s. And whoever was elected in 1976 — the first presidential election since Watergate — had to pick up the pieces left behind after Richard Nixon’s lawless undermining of our democracy. America was a mess. But Jimmy Carter combined the kind of simple honesty and sound policy necessary to put us on the pathway up and out. And there is our contrast.

Carter responded to inflation with painful austerity; Joe Biden avoided the hard decision, worsened inflation, and as he leaves office we are stuck with the bill for the largest peacetime deficit in US history. Carter led a cohesive, focused effort to deregulate the economy; Biden’s economic agenda was a hodgepodge of special favors for interest groups and contradictory mandates. When Carter’s brother, Billy, was bribed by Libya, he severed ties; after Biden’s son, Hunter, was bribed by Burisma, he still gave him White House access and a pardon.

To put it simply, in 2020 America needed a president like Jimmy Carter. It got Joe Biden instead.

1. It also made him susceptible, I suspect, to manipulation by his family. How could it not be a sign of mental decline that a politician as seasoned as Joe Biden allowed his convicted felon fail-son to control access to the Oval Office? It was a privileged position from which Hunter Biden was able to convince his faltering father to break his word and pardon him.

2. Honorable mention goes to the ludicrous stunt of issuing an executive order declaring the Equal Rights Amendment to be ratified. It’s something which only makes sense to the most deluded handful of progressive activists.

3. Senator Biden actually voted for the 2005 law that made the loans non-dischargeable, so it was a bi-partisan and cross-presidential mistake.

4. I chose eggs because it *is* unfair. The high price of eggs has primarily been a product of a bird flu epidemic, not general inflation.