We are 64 days into Donald Trump’s second administration, and it sure feels like a lot has been happening. We’re constantly told that this is an exceptionally transformative presidency that will leave a durable mark — one of the big ones.

It’s hard to know what to make of such claims, but maybe our thinking about them could be helped by checking in on how Joe Biden’s administration understood itself and was understood by its supporters 64 days in.

Four years ago this week, Mike Allen reported on Axios that Joe Biden had met with a group of historians to help him digest the awesome scope of his astonishing achievements. “Biden’s presidency has already been transformative,” Allen noted, “and he has many more giant plans teed up that could make Biden’s New Deal the biggest change to governance in our lifetimes.” The piece was, of course, complete with a classic Axios bullet-point list:

• Biden, who holds his first formal news conference today at 1:15 p.m. in the East Room, started his term with the $1.9 trillion COVID bill, with numerous measures tucked in to reduce inequality.
• Vaccines are rolling out, positioning Biden to get ahead of the pandemic. Democrats in Congress are pushing the most sweeping changes in voting rights since the 1960s.
• And he’s preparing an infrastructure and green-energy plan that’s bigger than the original tab for the Interstate highway system, to be followed by a domestic proposal (free community college, universal pre-K) that brings the pair of packages to $3 trillion, with possible pay-fors that would dramatically rebalance the tax system.

Not all of that ended up happening, needless to say, but the Democrats did pass major legislation very quickly in Biden’s term, unlike what we’re seeing so far in Trump’s second term.

A day before that piece, exactly four years ago today, another Axios article had explained how Biden and his team understood what had made possible the massive transformation they believed was underway. That one used a numbered list, another Axios go-to:

1. He has full party control of Congress, and a short window to go big.
2. He has party activists egging him on.
3. He has strong gathering economic winds at his back.
4. And he’s popular in polls.

Biden really was relatively popular at that moment, at least for a 21st-century president. His approval stood at 54 percent that day, according to Nate Silver’s daily presidential approval aggregator. That’s about seven points higher than where Donald Trump stands now, and Biden’s approval was basically the same as it had been on his inauguration day, while Trump’s has so far fallen some:

In retrospect, it’s almost sad to hear the Democrats’ excitement back then at the prospects of a transformational Biden era. Almost. But mostly it’s illuminating, and might cast the character of today’s news coverage in a different light.

I don’t actually think it’s at all clear that Biden achieved more in his first two months than Trump has, though it isn’t obvious that he achieved less. Maybe all this means that two months in might not be the ideal moment for judging what will endure and what won’t, or how much of the momentum new presidents can create when they get started ultimately burns off.

It’s possible that Trump’s second term really will prove utterly transformational. There are reasons to think so. Or maybe four years from now we will wonder how we could have thought so, and struggle to remember what exactly got done. If you’re certain you know which it will be, you should be less so.