Instead, he’s the president who stayed too long and whose administration thus arched between two terms of a nemesis he once defeated and then let back into power: Donald Trump.

To call this Biden’s political tragedy would be crass. This, after all, is a man who lived unending personal anguish after burying his first wife and two of his children. But it’s the fate he’s been handed by history — and his own grave electoral miscalculation.

This dark reality shadowed Biden’s farewell address on Wednesday night — his latest attempt to write a first draft of history about a presidency he insists is worth far more than the ignominy of a single term.

“My eternal thanks to you, the American people,” the president said from the Oval Office at just after 8 p.m. on the East Coast. “After 50 years of public service, I give you my word I still believe in the idea for which this nation stands, a nation where the strengths of our institutions and the character of our people matter and must endure.”

But by Monday afternoon, the foe who Biden warned in 2020 represented a mortal threat to America’s soul will be back behind the Oval Office desk, with Biden headed into a Delaware retirement and leaving the country to face whatever happens next.

With this in mind, Biden used his address to warn of the threat he thinks Trump’s second term — and what he styled as his successor’s band of “robber barons” — represents. If anything, he appears to believe the existential peril is greater now that it was when he launched his 2020 campaign.