Five things Biden will be remembered for

In his farewell address to the US nation on Wednesday, Joe Biden listed the accomplishments of his presidency but acknowledged "it will take time to feel the full impact of all we've done together".

The outgoing president opened his 17-minute speech by stressing that the new ceasefire deal in Gaza had been "developed and negotiated by my team". It remains to be seen if this tentative truce will be a lasting legacy of Biden's term but his administration's support for Israel "at every turn", despite its "relentless outpouring of violence", has left an "indelible moral stain", said Stephen M. Walt in Foreign Policy.

Presidential legacies are "complicated matters", said The Atlantic, but, as Biden leaves The White House, he seems "less a transformational figure than a historical parenthesis". His four years in office will be remembered for his failure both to "grasp the political moment" and to achieve "the essential mission of his presidency": to "preserve democracy by preventing Donald Trump's return to power".

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Withdrawal from Afghanistan

Biden's "first misstep as president came half a world away", with the shambolic US withdrawal from Afghanistan in August 2021, said the BBC's North America correspondent Anthony Zurcher. Backing the Trump-negotiated end to "the forever war", Biden promised there would be no "a hasty rush to the exit" but "we'll do it responsibly, deliberately, and safely".

The reality was anything but, as "scenes of chaos at Kabul airport dominated world news", said The Guardian. Despite the majority of Americans backing the US exit plan, the chaotic and hurried withdrawal painted a picture of a great power in decline, and Republicans on the House Foreign Affairs Committee claimed it "degraded" US national security.

For a president who prided himself on his foreign-policy experience, it was a particularly disastrous moment. Biden's Gallup approval rating dipped below 50% for the first time – a mark it would never reach again.

Inflation hitting hard

On the domestic front, Biden "has much to point to", said The Washington Post, perhaps most notably "an economic recovery out of the pandemic" that is "the envy of other countries".

Biden's landmark "American Rescue Plan" delivered nearly $2 trillion in new government spending, and was quickly followed by a trillion-dollar bi-partisan infrastructure investment bill. But rampant inflation – due, in some part, to these policies – proved stubborn to shift, and voters came to blame Biden's presidency for the high prices in stores.

The fault lay with Biden's focus on policies that took too long to translate into economic benefits for the average American worker. By the summer before the 2024 presidential election, the monthly inflation numbers had dropped below 3%, economic growth was steady, unemployment rates low, and "the US had outperformed the world's other industrialised nations" but "voters continued to have a pessimistic view of the economy," said the BBC's Zurcher. And "they did not forgot nor forgive" at the ballot box.

"The time horizon" associated with Biden's major pieces of legislation was "way out of sync with the exigencies of the presidential election," Brent Cebul, associate professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania, told the BBC.

Support for Ukraine

The Biden administration was quick to support Ukraine following Russia's invasion in February 2022. And Biden's continued support, including $183 billion in military aid, "has been critical to Ukraine's effort to repel the Russian invasion, and has inspired Nato allies to do the same", said international security expert Dafydd Townley on The Conversation.

But fierce fighting "continues on the frontlines with no clear plan for a peace deal", said CBS News.

Biden also faced criticism early in the conflict "for holding back on sending the most lethal weapons", and then, later, Republicans attacked him for "spending too much money on Ukraine aid".

The White House was pursuing a "Goldilocks strategy," said Phillips Payson O’Brien, a professor of strategic studies at the University of St Andrews, in The Atlantic. Biden and his aides were "hoping to help Ukraine fight without provoking Putin too much".

What this meant in practice is that the Biden administration "has treated the Ukraine conflict like a crisis to be managed, not a war to be won".

Decision to run in 2024

Biden ran for president in 2020 as a transition candidate – an "implicit but clear pledge that he intended to serve a single term", said The New York Times. Yet, despite record low approval ratings, voters' concern about his age and clear signs of physical and mental decline, Biden made the decision to run again in 2024, claiming that he was the only person capable of beating Donald Trump.

A disastrous first presidential debate in June led to pressure from Democrat big-hitters for him to stand down but the damage to the party's re-election hopes had already been done. His replacement, Kamala Harris, had only 100 days to introduce herself to the electorate as presidential candidate, and distance herself from Biden's more unpopular policies.

While history may judge Biden's record more favourably with the passing of time – as it has fellow one-term president Jimmy Carter – the fact that he ran again in 2024 "in the face of voters' broad discontent and on top of the specific concerns they had about his age" will surely "be a part of" his legacy, said The Washington Post.

"He'd like his legacy to be that he rescued us from Trump," Democratic strategist Susan Estrich told the BBC's Zurcher. "But sadly, for him, his legacy is Trump again. He is the bridge from Trump One to Trump Two."

The Hunter pardon

Having repeatedly vowed not to pardon his son Hunter, who was convicted of three felony gun charges, Biden did just that, only weeks after Trump was voted back in. His decision was widely criticised by both Republicans and Democrats, with The Atlantic's Jonathan Chait branding it the "hypocrisy of fatherly indulgence".

Biden said he would "abide by the results of the justice system as a matter of principle", Chait wrote, but "in breaking his promise" and "issuing a sweeping pardon of his son for any crimes he may have committed over an 11-year period", he has prioritised "his own feelings over the defence of his country".

The Hunter pardon put Democrats in the "almost impossible position of demanding equal treatment under the law for convicted felon Trump, while trying to excuse Biden's whitewashing of his son's own criminal record", said TIME.

"A father’s love is admirable; a president's lie is not," said The New York Times, "In one of his last major political acts in office, Joe Biden forgot who he was." And the consequence? "History won't be kind."