With his characteristic dyspeptic vitriol, Donald Trump scorns Joe Biden as the “worst president in the history of America”. The historian Robert McElvaine hails him as a “great president”, arguing that his accomplishments rival those of “both Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson, the two most effective of 20th-century presidents”, and since Biden didn’t enjoy the congressional majorities of those giants, he had to do it, “as was said about Ginger Rogers doing everything that Fred Astaire could do, backwards and in high heels”.

What is clear is that after four contentious years, Biden leaves Washington as a remarkably consequential one-term president.

His greatest successes came in domestic policy. Inheriting an economy in shutdown from the pandemic, Biden orchestrated the best recovery in the industrial world, leaving his successor an economy with low unemployment and low inflation, “an economy that is about as good as it ever gets”, in the words of Mark Zandi, chief economist of Moody’s Analytics.

This wasn’t simply luck. Ron Klain, Biden’s first chief of staff, noted that Biden delivered “the largest economic recovery plan since Roosevelt, the largest infrastructure plan since Eisenhower, the most judges confirmed since Kennedy, the second-largest healthcare bill since Johnson and the largest climate change bill in history”.

By sustaining Trump’s tariffs and integrating them with a new industrial policy – focused on alternative energy and high-tech investment – Biden consolidated bipartisan support for the break........

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