Biden bids farewell from Oval Office as Trump looms over his legacy

By Jeff Mason and Andrea Shalal

(Reuters) - President Joe Biden will cap his half-century political career on Wednesday with a final Oval Office speech, hoping to cement a legacy that has been overshadowed by Democrats' failure to stop Donald Trump from returning to the White House.

Biden ran for president in 2020 as a transition figure, but opted at the unprecedented age of 80 to run for reelection, convinced he was the only Democrat who could beat Trump. Forced out of the race in July after a disastrous debate against Trump, Biden has been blamed by some Democrats for their November wipeout, after Vice President Kamala Harris topped the ticket and put together a whirlwind campaign.

Biden and his allies oversaw the U.S.'s COVID recovery, funded an infrastructure revival, sparked new semiconductor chips manufacturing, and tackled climate change as they tried to rebalance inequality and invest in the future. He leaves an outperforming U.S. economy and optimistic businesses.

But Biden was unable to heal divisions in the country the way he had hoped, or stop democratic backsliding around the globe. His crowning political achievement -- defeating Trump in 2020 -- was temporary. Now the Republican president-elect has vowed to undo much of what the Democratic administration accomplished.

Biden addressed what he described as an ongoing threat in a letter released early Wednesday by the White House.

"I ran for president because I believed that the soul of America was at stake. The very nature of who we are was at stake. And, that’s still the case," he said, urging Americans to keep fighting for the country's focus on equality, life liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

"All Joe Biden wanted was to be remembered for the great things he did for this country and, at least in the short run, they've been eclipsed by his ill-conceived decision to run," said David Axelrod, a former adviser to President Barack Obama.

"He became a historic president when he defeated Trump. So obviously the fact that Trump is resurgent and returning to power, more powerful than he was when he left, is an unhappy coda to the story."

A White House official said that legacies are set over the long term.

“In historical terms, it has been a millisecond since the election. This president has locked in the most significant legislative record since LBJ, and the irreversible benefits of those laws will grow over decades," the official said.

Senator Chris Coons, a longtime ally, said Biden faced an economic crisis, a public health crisis, and a democracy crisis following the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol by Trump supporters when he came into office that year.

"The country was in the depths of crises. The recovery from that pandemic has been his single greatest accomplishment," Coons said.

Biden's administration oversaw the distribution of COVID vaccines and an economic recovery that defied predictions of a recession, even as inflation soared and prices remained high, souring voters on his economic stewardship.

Republicans seized on public frustration, stoking anger over high prices with charges of Democrats' elitism and disconnection from working class voters.

“You cannot reverse four and a half decades of rising inequality with a few years of absolute good economic outcomes and policy changes,” said Heidi Shierholz, president of the Economic Policy Institute. “But one of the most fundamental things they did was provide relief recovery at the scale that was needed to generate a strong jobs recovery."

AFGHANISTAN, ISRAEL

Biden, who spent more than three decades in the U.S. Senate and eight years as vice president to Obama before his four years as president, cites a unified Western response to Russia's war with Ukraine, the strengthening of alliances, and the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan as key foreign policy achievements.

Thirteen U.S. military members died during the chaotic Afghanistan withdrawal in August 2021, and Biden's popularity never recovered.

His staunch support for Israel, which killed tens of thousands of Palestinians in response to the Hamas militant group's deadly attack on the Jewish state, split the Democratic party, and Biden's reputation with the left suffered.

Vincent Rigby, a former senior national security adviser to Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, said Biden would forever be remembered as an "interlude" president despite his solid achievements in rebuilding trust in the United States after Trump’s first term.

“We’ll see how history treats him five, 10, 15 years from now, but he’ll be seen as the president between the two Trump presidencies. He held the line, but Trump came back."

(Reporting by Jeff Mason and Andrea Shalal; editing by Heather Timmons, Leslie Adler and Shri Navaratnam)