A week from today we will bid farewell to an administration that has done more harm than good. 

There have been positive highlights in the past four years, but they are deeply overshadowed by a long list that is best characterized as a blatant disregard for human rights and a selfish love of power that in some ways led to the reelection of a fascist. 

More than anything, Biden has embodied the contradictions that Democrats in positions of power harbor. Democrats profess to be the party of human dignity. They profess to be a party that will protect the rights of those that Republicans attack in broad daylight. 

Yet it is Biden’s administration that has gifted bombs to a country that drops them on displaced persons camps. It is Biden who has sent ICE billions in taxpayer dollars despite campaigning on decreasing their funding. 

This gets to my biggest takeaway. Biden has shown us what the Democratic Party is. A party that says one thing then proceeds to aid and abet the worst genocide this century has witnessed. They profess to care about working people, and while Biden’s administration has in some instances lived up to that standard — a point I will address soon — he has failed to be the fighter this country desperately needed. 

First, let us address the thing that Biden will be remembered for the most. Since the Hamas-led massacre that took place on October 7, 2023, Israel has inflicted unimaginable pain and suffering on Palestinian civilians in Gaza and the West Bank. This is on top of the violations of Lebanese and Syrian sovereignty. All of these violations of international law, at the behest of the internationally recognized war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu, have received financial and political support from Biden. 

All in all, Biden’s administration has actively participated in the death of tens of thousands of people. A report released last week by the Lancet concluded that an estimated 70,000 are dead as a direct result of the killing taking place in Gaza, and this data does not include the past three months. Factoring in indirect deaths due to starvation, dehydration, hypothermia and disease would show us an even more disturbing figure. 

Only history will show us the true nature of the atrocities taking place, and it is history that will remember Biden as the President who actively participated in what the Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have labeled a genocide against Palestinians. 

This stain on Biden’s administration is so ugly and so encompassing that few will remember the positive takeaways, but when it comes to anti-trust law and labor rights, there have been some wins that deserve attention. A lot of the credit goes to Lina Khan, the head of the Federal Trade Commission who was nominated by Biden in 2021. 

Since then, Khan has filed major anti-trust lawsuits against Amazon and Google and has even at times reoriented the focus of the FTC on labor, as seen in an antitrust lawsuit against Kroger. She has also called for the regulation of AI and instituted a “Click–to–cancel” rule for subscription services that require companies to make it as easy to cancel a subscription as it is to sign up for one. 

Her advocacy on behalf of consumers and workers is part of what has led billionaires like Mark Cuban and Elon Musk to call for an end to the Khan era, which has been all but guaranteed with the incoming Trump administration. For a short four years, we have witnessed what government regulation of big business can and should look like, and to be honest, it was quite nice. 

Biden has also embraced an image of organized labor in a way that has been quite surprising. He became the first sitting president in American history to join a picket line when he stood by members of the United Auto-Workers Union, and the next year invited and acknowledged the leader of that union, Shawn Fain, at his State of the Union address. 

It has been decades since this country has had such a pro-labor president, and this aspect of his presidency will be missed, but at the same time, optics can only go so far. Macro-level issues associated with inequality have continued to persist, and although on paper inflation got better throughout his tenure, the financial pressures that families continue to experience remained relatively unchanged. 

This persistence of increasing inequalities has become a feature of our political status quo, and it is the disgust and rage toward our status quo that laid the groundwork for Trump’ reelection. More importantly, however, Biden’s inability to recognize the political power of attacking the status quo and understanding that this country needed a candidate that represents change, not stability, is what gave Trump the advantage. 

His selfish desire to be president for another four years blinded him to the fact that he campaigned on being a one-term president. He was only elected in 2020 because people understood that he wasn’t Trump, but this election cycle was completely different. People needed change, and a politician who supports genocide while rejecting the desires of young voters is not equipped to put up a fight against a fascist who is promising to upend a system that is enraging millions of voters. 

Thankfully, he dropped out of the race, but by then Trump already had a major advantage, and Kamala Harris quickly proved that she was a status quo candidate too, and one that would have been less favorable to labor. 

Biden deserves an immense amount of blame for the reelection of Donald Trump, and this is likely the other thing he will be remembered for the most. A second stain on his presidency. I know there are many more stains I failed to mention, but the main point is that the stains are so thick that there is no use in trying to wipe them away to see what productive accomplishments exist under them.