A poll conducted for DailyMail.com asked voters to describe outgoing President Joe Biden’s legacy in one word. The most common response was “nothing.” Overall, 54% of respondents either “strongly” or “somewhat” agreed that they could not name a single achievement.
Specifically, 34% of Democrats and 52% of independents surveyed said they couldn’t identify one major accomplishment by Biden, according to the survey released Sunday by J.L. Partners. “As far as public opinion is concerned, you have to squint to see even the echoes of a legacy — and even then people are more likely to remember it negatively,” J.L. Partners co-founder James Johnson said in the analysis.
After “nothing,” the next most popular answers were “economy,” “inflation” and “infrastructure,” according to the survey. The latter refers to Biden’s Bipartisan Infrastructure Deal, officially known as the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, which was passed by Congress in November 2021.
“Biden’s biggest achievements in office — such as legislation in Congress — are crowded out by the overriding view: That he was responsible for inflation, and that he was a mentally unwell commander in chief,” Johnson added.
According to the survey, Biden was rated the worst president in modern memory with a minus-30 rating, surpassing Richard Nixon, who held a minus-25 score. In contrast, Ronald Reagan topped the list with a +30 rating. Biden officially leaves office on Monday.
House Speaker Mike Johnson recalled a meeting with Joe Biden months after Republicans took control of the House that convinced him the president’s mind was failing him and that officials within Biden’s inner circle were keeping his condition from the American people.
The Louisiana Republican, in an interview with The Free Press, said that after he became speaker, it took weeks for him to finally get a meeting with Biden after Johnson learned of a number of growing national security threats.
“He has not been in charge for some time — and I know this by personal observation, and now the whole world knows it, and it’s been very concerning to me,” Johnson said in an “Honestly” podcast interview with The Free Press’s founder and editor, Bari Weiss. Johnson confirmed a June 2024 Wall Street Journal report, which relied on unnamed sources, that detailed the speaker’s reaction to Biden’s remarks during a late February 2024 White House meeting on sending military aid to Ukraine.
On the sidelines of that meeting, Johnson privately expressed his concern to Biden that freezing U.S. exports of liquefied natural gas (LNG)—a move reportedly intended to reassess America’s status as the world’s largest LNG exporter—could push European allies to rely on Russian supplies.
Such a shift would, in turn, indirectly finance Russian President Vladimir Putin’s war efforts and jeopardize several multibillion-dollar LNG export projects in Johnson’s home state of Louisiana. “And he looked at me, stunned, and said, ‘I didn’t do that,’” Johnson recalled in the video posted below.
“And I said, ‘Mr. President, yes, you did — it was an executive order three weeks ago.’ And he says, ‘I didn’t do that.’ He’s arguing with me,” Johnson continued. “I say, ‘Mr. President, respectfully, can I go out there and ask your secretary to print it out while we are here together — you definitely did that.’ He goes, ‘Oh, you’re talking about natural gas!’”
“It occurred to me, Bari, he was not lying to me. He genuinely did not know what he signed. And I walked [back] into that meeting with fear and loathing because I thought, ‘We’re in serious trouble — who’s running the country? Like, I don’t know who put the paper in front of him, but he didn’t know” he had signed the LNG ban.