Joe Biden’s failed presidency is ending with a blizzard of decisions that validate voters’ rejection of his vice president, who, when asked, could not think of a flaw in his record. He and she pretended, from opposite directions, to be what they are not.

He won his party’s 2020 nomination by defeating aggressively progressive senators Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders. Then, perhaps because aging had already rendered him pliable, some handlers convinced him he should be another Franklin D. Roosevelt. Governing as a synthetic New Dealer, he doomed his vice president, who ran as a synthetic centrist unable to outrun her authentic progressivism.

Two months into his presidency, the seeds of its ruin were sown with the American Rescue Plan, which pumped up demand for goods and services beyond the capacity of the economy to produce them. The predicted result, inflation, was exacerbated by the Inflation Reduction Act’s torrent of subsidies in the service of “industrial policy.”

Three weeks after the 2024 election, Biden’s administration, rushing to open wide the spending sluices before Jan. 20, provided almost $8 billion in subsidies to chip-maker Intel. Five days later, Intel’s CEO retired, effective immediately, his company having lost $16.6 billion in the previous quarter. The chair of Intel’s board of directors said the CEO’s departure would facilitate “restoring investor confidence.” The Biden administration’s investors of other people’s money already had sky-high confidence.

In December, the Biden administration gave a $15 billion low-interest loan to California utility PG&E. This loan is the largest ever from the Energy Department’s incorrigibly overconfident Loan Programs Office. The second-largest was made the day before — a $9.6 billion loan for a joint-venture Ford Motor battery plant.

In November, the LPO had funneled $6 billion to Rivian, an electric vehicle start-up that the New York Times reports “has had trouble ramping up sales beyond about 50,000 vehicles a year.” Fewer might be better: The Wall Street Journal reports that Rivian lost $107,043 on every vehicle it sold in the first nine months of 2024, even with Biden’s $7,500 tax credit per vehicle (up to $40,000 for its heaviest commercial EV). Rivian blames a “more challenging consumer environment” — customers are pickier than the Biden administration’s investors.

In December, the administration committed to a $7.5 billion loan for a joint venture involving automaker Stellantis, which owns Jeep and Chrysler. Almost simultaneously, Stellantis’s CEO resigned, the company’s stock price having fallen more than 50 percent in 2024.

(In 2009, the LPO served Barack Obama’s industrial policy by sinking $535 million in solar panel manufacturer Solyndra, which filed for bankruptcy in 2011. In 2010, the LPO gave a $465 million loan to Tesla. Henceforth, such transactions might be subjected to the withering squint of Elon Musk’s new “Department of Government Efficiency.”)

No prior president used mass communications more insultingly to more Americans than Biden did with his hyperbolic warnings about the danger of Americans imposing “Jim Crow 2.0” and voting for “semi-fascism.” Democrats, Biden said, would save American democracy in 2024. The saving would, presumably, begin after Democrats finished trying to ban Biden’s opponent from the ballot and incarcerate him.

The Post recently reported this flabbergasting detail about Biden’s current state of mind: He regrets picking Merrick Garland as attorney general rather than someone who would have more quickly prosecuted Donald Trump. Biden’s belief that even more aggressive lawfare would have helped him politically is redundant evidence of his cognitive condition.

The Biden administration’s extralegal overreaching earned many judicial rebukes. These concerned, inter alia, an eviction moratorium, a vaccine mandate, student loan forgiveness, and pressuring social media companies to intensify censorship (“content moderation”) of speech (“disinformation”) annoying to the administration.

Biden’s revisions of his descriptions of his involvement with his son Hunter’s financial escapades (Biden did not know about them; then he was not involved in them; then he did not benefit from them) culminated in his sweeping pardon for Hunter. This erased Hunter’s criminal convictions and will prevent prosecutions arising from any activities not yet discovered. To the suspicious, this looks like “the big guy” (as Hunter had referred to Biden in one of his undertakings) providing preemptive protection for Hunter and perhaps other members of his family.

A bipartisan chorus of critics said the pardon would damage Biden’s legacy. Damage it? A British historical site once displayed a sign threatening prosecution of anyone who would “damage the ruins.”

George Will writes a column for the Washington Post.