It’s fitting, I suppose, that the worst president in American history just gave the worst farewell speech in American history. Because that’s what it was. Last night, Joe Biden took to the Oval Office to address the nation for the final time. It was a self-serving affair from the jump, with Biden trying desperately to convince the American people that the past four years haven’t been as awful as they’ve seemed.

It was a monumental task, a “hard sell,” as Fox News’s Brit Hume called it afterward. Indeed, Biden’s fellow Americans have already tuned him out. A new Gallup poll makes this clear:

Compared with nine recent presidents included in the new Gallup poll, Biden rates most similarly to Richard Nixon, who has a -42 net rating (12% outstanding or above average versus 54% below average or poor). Biden receives more “poor” reviews than Nixon does (37% vs. 30%), but Biden gets more outstanding or above-average ratings.

The most disturbing finding of the Gallup poll, though, was that 19% of Americans think Biden will be viewed by history as an “outstanding” president. Clearly, Gallup oversampled Biden family members and Ivy League history professors.

The soon-to-be ex-president began by taking full credit for the Israel-Hamas ceasefire and hostage release — an agreement that Donald Trump’s Middle East envoy, Steve Witkoff, had helped broker and that Trump himself had been demanding since early December.

From there, Biden’s speechwriters took him to the Statue of Liberty, a place and a symbol that seemed oddly unfitting for a president who’d spent the past four years trampling on the rights of his fellow Americans.

But this, of course, was only Biden’s farewell speech in a ceremonial sense. Everyone who’s been following his presidency knows that his real farewell address was delivered 203 days ago, on June 27, the date of his disastrous debate with Donald Trump.

That implosion notwithstanding, Oklahoma Senator Markwayne Mullin took in last night’s affair and put it bluntly: “We watched so you don’t have to: the Joe Biden farewell speech was ineffective, tired, and anything but unifying. Just like his presidency.”

The speech played as much on the sympathies of the American people as it did George Orwell’s memory hole. “In the past four years, our democracy has held strong,” Biden said. “And every day, I’ve kept my commitment to be president for all Americans through one of the toughest periods in our nation’s history.”

For all Americans?

He droned on, blaming “an economic crisis that we inherited” and bragging about “one of the greatest modernizations of infrastructure in our entire history, [including] new roads, bridges, clean water, affordable high-speed Internet, for every American.”

The non-inflationary economy that Trump handed to Biden was already rocketing to recovery as the pandemic began to ebb. But he wrecked it by printing trillions of dollars we didn’t have. Last we checked, $42 billion had been allocated for that high-speed Internet program, but not a single American had yet been connected.

“You know,” he said, “it will take time to feel the full impact of all we’ve done together, but the seeds are planted, and they’ll grow, and they’ll bloom for decades to come.” This must be part of that “very strong hand” he says he’s leaving for Trump.

Biden warned of a “tech-industrial complex” and of “the dangerous concentration of power in the hands of a very few ultra-wealthy people,” that “oligarchy.” He warned that “an oligarchy is taking shape in America,” but what he really meant was that a handful of wealthy entrepreneurs — Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg — are no longer reflexively funneling money to the Democrats.

Said Fox News’s Bret Baier afterward: “He started talking about the threat from an oligarchy and the concentration of power and wealth having an impact on U.S. policy. You know, it’s interesting that Democrats raised a lot more money and spent a lot more money on that election — almost 2-to-1 over the Trump campaign.” True that.

After the speech, the normally poker-faced Victor Davis Hanson could hardly contain his laughter on this point: “The subtext of that was that all of these oligarchs who supported him in 2020 got tired of him.”

VDH also noted the absurdity of Biden’s warning about this oligarchy after having just last week awarded the Medal of Freedom to the embodiment of America-hating dark-money oligarchs, George Soros.

Tucked amid a to-do list of things he never got to, Biden aimed this one directly at his former friend Nancy Pelosi: “We need to ban members of Congress from trading stock while they’re in the Congress.”

Perhaps the richest moment of the speech, though, was when Biden said, “People should be able to make as much as they can, but play by the same rules, pay their fair share in taxes.” This is from the guy who just pardoned his wastrel son for felony gun and tax evasion charges, as well as any other of those “same rules” he might’ve broken since 2014.

Perhaps if Joe Biden and his fellow Democrats had put America first in both their foreign and domestic policy decisions of the last four years, the American people wouldn’t have so resoundingly rejected them on November 5. Then again, had they done so, they wouldn’t be Democrats.

Some three months before the 2020 election, I ripped the Democrat Party for rigging its primary against socialist Bernie Sanders and propping up an already addled Joe Biden simply because he polled better than Sanders against Donald Trump.

At the time, I wrote:

If one ever needed proof that the Democrats are more concerned with regaining power than they are with the welfare of this nation — or with the welfare of Joe Biden, for that matter — one need look no further than this sad, pathetic, preposterous presidential candidacy.

I remember wondering, too, what things would be like — indeed, what Joe Biden would be like — in four years if he ever became president.

Sadly, now we know.