For 1333 days, President Joe Biden was the only one, he repeatedly insisted, who could possibly defeat former president Donald Trump again.

He shrugged off his promise to be a bridge to a new generation. He told anyone who would listen that he was the best choice for Democrats even as inflation soared and his approval rating plunged. His faith in himself remained unshaken by the increasingly obvious impact of his age, which left him unable to make an effective case against Trump.

On Tuesday (Wednesday AEDT), Biden watched from the White House residence as voters rejected Vice President Kamala Harris and ushered Trump back into power for another four years. Biden, who repeatedly warned about the danger that Trump poses, is left with the reality that his predecessor is now his successor, chosen with what is likely to be a majority of the popular vote.

Among his closest allies, Biden will be remembered as the person who vanquished Trump in 2020 and ended his own reelection campaign for the good of the country. But many Democrats are already casting him in a much different, and deeply unflattering, light: as a one-term president who set his party on a path to failure in 2024.

“He was supposed to be the bridge, a transition bridge for the next generation of Democrats,” said Douglas Brinkley, a veteran presidential historian. Instead, Brinkley said, he “blew up the bridge” by not getting out of the 2024 presidential race sooner.

Trump’s return to power is now destined to be at the centre of Biden’s legacy.

Historians will debate for years how much responsibility Biden bears for that result. But some things are already clear. Despite a half-century in politics, the president fundamentally misjudged the American electorate and underestimated its willingness to embrace Trump and his authoritarian behaviour, legal transgressions and vows of retribution.

Biden’s decision in early 2023 to pursue a second term at the age of 80 denied Democrats the chance for a robust debate about who would be the best person to prevent the former president from returning to office for a second term. Biden waited so long to abandon his reelection bid that Harris effectively inherited the nomination without having to ask voters their opinion.

Leaders in the party, including former President Barack Obama, at the time praised Biden’s willingness to give up power and step aside. But many Democrats said they were angry that Biden’s timing left just months for Harris to mount a campaign.

“We should have had a primary with all the talent and it would have given us a better chance to educate everyone on who the candidates were,” said Mark Buell, a prominent Democratic donor who supported Harris’ campaign.

Fighting back tears

At 4.02pm on election day, the White House sent a note to reporters. Biden was done for the day. He would not be joining Harris at her planned victory party at Howard University. He would watch the returns with a handful of his closest aides and family.

His staff did the same. Some hunkered down at home. Others went to bars. A small group of the true believers on his team gathered in the West Wing, expecting – or maybe hoping – to see Harris eke out a narrow victory over the former president.

As it became clear that would not happen, some aides fought back tears. Many had been with Biden for almost a decade. They had internalised the president’s optimism and believed that voters would reward Harris for being part of an agenda that included lower drug prices, millions of new jobs and investments in infrastructure.

A good number of the president’s team members believed until the final hours that the country was done with Trump, pointing to better-than-expected Democratic performances in midterm congressional elections in 2022. Those elections were seen at the time as a rejection of Trump’s Make America Great Again movement. Many of Biden’s staff members repeated his oft-stated assessment that he was the only one to have ever defeated Trump.

“I haven’t lost. I beat him last time. I’ll beat him this time,” Biden insisted to the left-leaning hosts of MSNBC’s Morning Joe program last summer, just 13 days before he was pressured to drop out of the race.

At Howard University on Tuesday, where thousands of Harris’ supporters had gathered to celebrate the first female president, the mood went from euphoric to subdued and finally to concerned. What started as a dance party on what is known as the Yard turned sour as CNN, playing on large outdoor monitors, showed Trump making gains.

Many in the crowd left the Yard after CNN reported that Trump had won North Carolina. By the time the co-chair of Harris’ campaign, Cedric Richmond, took the stage and said Harris would not be speaking, many who had once packed the area had already left.

Early Wednesday morning, when it was clear that Trump had won, the believers were trying to make sense of what had happened, and what was likely to be the fate of the agenda they had all worked on for years.

“His presidency will not get high marks because he was hired to extinguish Trump and Trumpism and they’re both alive and well in America,” Brinkley said.

The president and his top aides have warned for weeks that Trump would shred Biden’s agenda, aided by a Congress that could be entirely in Republican control and a Supreme Court that he stacked with conservative justices during his first term. Others said they believed Republicans might have a tougher time rolling back popular programs like price supports for medicine or investments in bridges, roads and airports.

Outside the 18-acre White House complex, allies of Biden grappled with what might have been. Did voters blame Harris for being part of Biden’s administration? Could she have done more to separate herself from the president in an effort to better define her own political identity? Would it have made a difference?

“This was an election about the Biden administration policies, particularly inflation and the economy,” said Quentin James, a co-founder of the Collective PAC, an organisation focused on supporting black voters and elected officials.

“There may have been an opportunity for her to distance herself from President Biden on the economy,” he said, “and I think that is the place where we have to look back and say what we could’ve done there.”

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‘For how long?’

In the summer of 2021, Biden gathered with European leaders for the first time as president in Cornwall, England. Trump had been ejected from office, he told his counterparts, and “America is back”.

Their response, Biden has said repeatedly since then, was ominous: “But for how long?” They wanted assurance that Trump’s time in office was an aberration and that they could trust that US foreign policy would not veer back toward the former president’s confrontational “America first” approach.

At the time, he told them that Trump would be just a moment in history, a brief detour from America’s place in the world that had existed since World War II.

But on Tuesday, he was proved wrong.

For Biden, that may be the cruelest cut to a political career that was largely built on his reputation as a master of global affairs. As a senator, he travelled to world capitals as the powerful chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. During eight years as vice president, he was a seasoned foreign policy adviser to Obama. And as president, Biden fashioned himself as the protector of democracy and the chief advocate for international institutions, especially NATO.

But voters decided to endorse a new direction.

Trump has been disdainful of NATO, accusing European nations of relying too heavily on the United States for their defence.

“The question becomes which is the norm and which is the exception,” said Richard Haass, the former president of the Council on Foreign Relations. “It is possible that Biden becomes the last post-World War II president and Trump the first of a new era.”

He added, “We probably won’t know for at least four years.”

‘They didn’t feel it’

Aides who worked in Biden’s orbit said he always intended to run for reelection. One former adviser, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid angering the president, said Biden and his strategists talked frequently about how to frame his agenda to win a second term.

But the president did little that was obvious to develop Harris as his inevitable successor. When he dropped out, however, he quickly endorsed her as the only possible replacement and she quickly consolidated his campaign apparatus.

Democrat Senator Chris Coons said that both Harris and Biden made the case to voters that the administration’s agenda had benefited Americans and should be extended for another four years.

“But they didn’t feel it,” Coons said in an interview on CNN. “And they didn’t give us credit for it.”

Michael LaRosa, who served as a top aide to the first lady, Jill Biden, said voters would judge Biden “fairly or unfairly” on his decision to seek reelection, not for his legislative accomplishments. He said Democrats were in for weeks or months of second-guessing and recriminations.

“That’s what we do in this town, Republican or Democrat,” LaRosa said. “It’s a bipartisan tradition to conduct a public MRI on any losing campaign.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.