President Biden’s half-century political career comes to a close on Monday, as President-elect Trump is inaugurated and succeeds Biden in the White House.
While the longtime Democratic senator from Delaware, two-term vice president and one-term president can point to a plethora of legislative victories and other achievements during his four years in the White House, Biden leaves office as one of the most unpopular presidents in the nation’s history.
And Biden, who successfully defeated Trump in the 2020 election as he pledged to turn a page on his predecessor, is facing a legacy tarnished by his inability to prevent Trump from returning to the presidency.
Biden ends his single term in the White House with approval ratings that remain well underwater.
He stood at 42% approval and 57% disapproval in the latest Fox News national poll, which was conducted Jan. 10-13 and released on Thursday.
Just 36% of Americans approved of the job Biden has been doing in the White House, according to the latest CNN poll, which matched the president’s previous low mark in the cable news network’s polling during Biden’s White House tenure.
John MacNeil, a founding director of Unite the Country, the super PAC that boosted the then-former vice president through the 2020 Democratic primaries, also acknowledged that Biden may be “seen as just a hiccup between Trump one and Trump two. That is something that historians will talk about.”