For better or worse, President Biden will go down in history as the turkey sandwiched between Donald Trump’s two slices of bread.

His claims of foreign policy gravitas and domestic spending accomplishments will forever be secondary to the fact that he ascended the political heights with his initial win that appeared to end President Trump’s career, only to surrender it all back to an even more politically potent Mr. Trump four years later.

“Biden is likely to be considered a minor president, notable primarily for the tragic irony that the president who campaigned on keeping Trump from a second term ended up being one of the people most responsible for him returning to the White House,” said Justin Vaughn, a political scientist at Coastal Carolina University who co-directs the Presidential Greatness Project.

It’s a startling fall for a man who, just six months ago, was hailed — at least by his Democratic Party and many in the media — as the man who delivered a powerfully strong economy, rebuilt international alliances and funneled trillions of taxpayer dollars into climate change, infrastructure and state and local governments.

Rep. Nancy Pelosi, who as House speaker was the architect of those legislative wins, said this summer that Mr. Biden was “a Mount Rushmore kind of president.”

Now many Democrats who congratulated him as he dropped out of the presidential race in July say Mr. Biden has ruined that legacy by waiting too long to drop out, bequeathing the nomination to a wounded Vice President Kamala Harris, and losing Congress to the GOP, too.

For Republicans and many independents, his legacy is even worse. They point to unfathomably bad borders, runaway inflation that plagued his early years and gargantuan federal budget deficits he has locked in for years to come.

Mr. Biden is attempting to recalibrate things with a week’s worth of events telling Americans what he thinks he got right. The high point will be a farewell address from the Oval Office on Wednesday.

He’ll have to overcome a significant legacy deficit.

Gallup, the venerable polling company, said a majority of Americans expect history to judge Mr. Biden as a “below average” or even “poor” president. About a quarter see him as “average,” while less than 20% say he was “above average” or even “outstanding.”

That gives him an overall net rating of -35, Gallup said, or about on par with Richard Nixon as the worst of 11 recent presidents.

That’s also worse than the -32 rating Mr. Trump scored in the same poll when he left office four years ago. His standing has markedly improved, and he now holds only a -4 rating, Gallup says.

Mr. Biden was never going to be seen as a great or even good president by most Republicans. But it’s Democrats’ whose changing views of Mr. Biden — based largely on the election results — are sinking him.

Franklin Foer, a Biden biographer and writer at The Atlantic, said the loss to Mr. Trump “is his legacy.”

“Everything else is an asterisk,” Mr. Foer wrote after the November vote.

But Juan Williams, a historian and political analyst, has argued that his fellow liberals are short-changing Mr. Biden’s economic and foreign policy wins.

“The scrappy kid from Scranton made America a better place,” Mr. Williams wrote in The Hill. “Americans may find themselves longing for the Biden years. They may even ask him — or his capable vice president — to step back into the fray and save the nation once more.”

Gallup says those arguments aren’t resonating.

It surveyed about 18 different yardsticks, from immigration, crime, race relations and the economy to terrorism and U.S. standing in the world. Americans said the U.S. lost ground over the last four years on every single measure but one — rights for gay, lesbian and transgender people.

Mr. Biden figures history will treat him better than all that.

In remarks to employees at the Labor Department in December he said it was “frustrating” not to get credit for what he saw as his accomplishments, but he thinks things will turn around.

“So much is going on, but it’s going to take a little bit of time,” Mr. Biden said.

Mr. Biden entered office on a sugar high, having ushered Mr. Trump into what seemed like a final political retirement. His honeymoon lasted into the summer of 2021, with a net positive approval rating of 5 percentage points, according to the RealClearPolitics.com average of polls.

That changed in late August of that year, as his troop withdrawal in Afghanistan turned disastrous. His approval turned negative on Aug. 23, according to RealClearPolitics, and it has never touched positive territory since.

Despite that, historians were bullish on Mr. Biden as recently as a year ago.

The Presidential Greatness Project, which annually surveys presidential historians, placed him in the top third of all time at No. 14, ahead of Ronald Reagan and Woodrow Wilson and just behind Bill Clinton and John Adams.

President Obama was ranked seventh, while President Trump was dead last.

This year’s survey isn’t out yet but Mr. Biden is poised for a tumble, according to Mr. Vaughn, who runs the survey along with a colleague.

“Since we conducted the Presidential Greatness survey where Biden ranked 14th, several key developments that are likely to affect his presidential legacy transpired, most notably his disastrous debate performance and subsequent forced departure from the race,” Mr. Vaughn said in an email. “Trump’s ultimate victory, the broad pardon of son Hunter, and his largely invisible presidency over the last year of his administration are all developments that will adversely affect his historic reputation.”

• Stephen Dinan can be reached at sdinan@washingtontimes.com.