The triumph and tragedy of Joe Biden’s life is that he got exactly what he wanted.

It’s not true that he ran in 2020 because he felt duty-bound to do so after seeing white supremacists marching in Charlottesville, though the president has made the claim so many times he may now truly believe it. According to multiple accounts, Biden and his team originally filmed an announcement video outside his childhood home in Scranton stressing his working-class roots, before scrapping it and seizing on Charlottesville as a rationale.

The White House was a boyhood dream; he wrote about it in the sixth grade. He was talking about the presidency before he was elected to anything, and as early as 1976, four years into his first Senate term, after he had shocked the state of Delaware with an insurgent, youth-driven campaign that no one, not even he himself, expected to have the legs it did. But sometimes dreams come with a price.

Biden surely did not imagine his career would end like this: one of the most unpopular presidents in history, forced out by his own party, after a weekend spent reportedly fuming in private at his betrayal, as one prominent Democrat after another abandoned him — all on the back of weeks of the entire country openly discussing, sometimes mocking, his mental competency. This is not how successful presidencies are supposed to end.

Democrats are heaping plaudits on Biden for the “heroism” he showed in deciding to step down, in the hope of emotionally smoothing his way out. But though he may bask in this public face-saving campaign that’s been launched for his benefit, it will do little to take out the sting. After all, more than anyone, Biden is aware this was never his decision.

Though he joins the ignominious one-term-presidents club, Biden can at least say he has outdone his peers in one key presidential category: bloodshed overseas. Finally achieving his political ambitions meant carrying out one the most heinous presidential crimes in a generation, worse than anything Donald Trump actually did and rivaled this century only by George W. Bush’s Iraq War — a human and geopolitical disaster that Biden also had no small part in engineering.

The final project of Biden’s presidency, the very last act of his public life, was stubbornly facilitating a human extermination campaign in Gaza so savage, people who have spent their lives watching the worst that humanity is capable of have run out of novel ways to describe the horrors they are seeing there. As Democratic paeans to Biden’s honor and decency dutifully flow in, the total number of dead in Gaza has been put at 186,000 at minimum by the Lancet.

After a life marked by the shocking, tragic death of his wife and infant daughter, Biden has ended up devoting nearly a quarter of his presidency to inflicting this same suffering on an entire people, many times over: not just children and parents killed, but entire families and bloodlines annihilated. He has done so against all reason and sense, not to mention unprecedented objections from experts and career diplomats within his own government. Besides a moral disaster, it has been a political one, sending US standing on a downward tumble worse than the Iraq debacle and making the United States a potential target for terrorist violence again, one of the all-time self-inflicted defeats by a great power.

It was the bloody culmination of a remarkably destructive career, which saw Biden climb the political ladder over forty years, rung by rung, often by treading on the poor and marginalized below him: from helping kick-start the country’s mass-incarceration crisis and restricting abortion rights to playing a leading role in the Iraq disaster and helping the hard-right and now corruption-stained Clarence Thomas get on the Supreme Court.

But for a brief window, Biden the man nearly redeemed himself.

Whether he knows it or not — and based on the case he desperately made for himself the past weeks, Biden views esoteric foreign-policy matters like NATO expansion and AUKUS as his most important accomplishments — Biden’s presidency, in a strange twist of history, ended up playing a vital role in the ongoing political transformation of the country. Against all odds, Biden — a career-long conservative who welcomed the election of Ronald Reagan, voted for NAFTA, and once said that “[Bill] Clinton got it right” when he rejected “class warfare and populism” — advanced the fortunes of an organized left that he had never cared for.

Unlike Hillary Clinton in 2016, Biden made amends with his socialist rival Bernie Sanders and brought him and some of his supporters into the fold. He adopted at least some of Sanders’s political program and ran, however half-heartedly and haltingly, one of the more progressive Democratic presidential campaigns in recent memory (a low bar, but still) — and won. He gained control of the Senate by promising to send checks directly to every American. He armed his administration with progressive trustbusters and allies of organized labor, and became outspokenly pro-union, becoming the first sitting US president to join a picket line and basking in the praise from many quarters as the most pro-labor president in nearly a century.

The career-long deficit hawk and bipartisan obsessive passed a bigger stimulus than his former boss had on a party-line vote and was rewarded with the best approval numbers of his presidency. For a moment, he seemed poised to make real the customary campaign-season Franklin Delano Roosevelt comparisons, as his immensely popular “human infrastructure” proposal — a major, long-overdue expansion of the US welfare state, and one crafted largely by Sanders — promised to, if not undo, at least make up for the profound damage Biden had inflicted in the course of getting to where he was.

And then he did what he had expressly said would be a mistake, splitting that bill in two, frittering away months on getting bipartisan Republican buy-in for its own sake, and dooming the ambitious proposal. As so often in his career, Biden proved his own worst enemy.

There is a tendency, even among the Left, to overstate the extent of Biden’s populism. This is, after all, a president who nickel-and-dimed Georgia voters on the $2,000 checks he had pledged, quickly abandoned his promise of a $15 minimum-wage increase that might have helped voters weather inflation, and refused to fight to keep transformative pandemic-era policies like Medicaid expansion and expanded unemployment insurance. However ambitious his Build Back Better legislation was, we sometimes talk about it as if it had actually become law, when the reality is it died — and did so in large part because Biden considered getting a handshake with Republicans a higher priority.

That his presidency became the unlikely vehicle for progressive economic populism tells us less about Biden himself than the state of the Left: a Left that, however disorganized and defeated, succeeded in dragging someone like Biden into adopting even a watered-down version of its political program. It did so not just through political pressure, but by changing the political landscape to such an extent that a man who had spent his life tacking right in the chase for political power came to realize there was a popular constituency for a left-populist agenda, and that it was worth his while politically, crucial to his legacy even, to give pursuing such a thing an honest-to-God shot.

That Biden fell short of doing so is a tragedy, not just for the Left and for the millions of Americans who continue to struggle paycheck to paycheck, but for the man himself. For all the death and carnage he has caused, it was hard not to feel a pang of pity for Biden as his reelection ambitions fell apart last week: his presidency in tatters, abandoned by his allies, and struggling to get in a car as he labored under the COVID he had contracted at the lowest point in his presidency. It’s only human.

But we needn’t trouble ourselves too much. Nobody asked Biden to run in 2020 — his own former boss asked him not to, in fact — nor was he the only candidate who could have beaten Trump. In fact, as his own advisors privately admitted, it was not Biden who saved the country from Trump, but Biden who was saved from humiliating defeat, by a lucky combination of the pandemic, an undisciplined Trump, and the very progressive activists he spent his life disdaining. More to the point, he was more than willing to plow ahead and go along with his team’s elaborate efforts to hide his decline, and risk taking his party, his colleagues, and the country over the cliff’s edge with him as long as he got to be in the driver’s seat.

For better or worse, Joe Biden wanted this. Sometimes the greatest curse is that we get what we want.