In his inaugural address four years ago, President Joe Biden portrayed former President Donald Trump’s tumultuous tenure as an aberration and his own election as a return to political norms.

“Much to repair. Much to restore. Much to heal,” Biden had declared in 2021, sun splashing on his face as he stood on the West Front of the Capitol. He called for “Unity! Unity!”

But in Biden’s farewell address Wednesday night, it seemed more likely that his four years were the aberration while Trump has become the driving norm.

Biden seemed to acknowledge as much, delivering a stark warning about what he called the “dangerous concentration of power in the hands of a very few ultra-wealthy people.” His words were clearly aimed at Trump and his inner circle, including Elon Musk, the world’s richest person, although he didn’t cite anyone by name.

“An oligarchy is taking shape in America,” the president said, “devoted not to protecting democracy or insuring opportunity for average people but to amassing money and power for themselves.”

He called for sweeping reforms, including 18-year term limits for Supreme Court justices, a ban on members of Congress trading stocks, an end to undisclosed “dark money” in politics, and a constitutional amendment making it clear that a president isn’t immune from prosecution for crimes they commit while in office.

His message of a “tech-industrial complex” deliberately echoed a warning issued by President Dwight D. Eisenhower in his historic farewell address, in 1961, when the former five-star general had cautioned about the emerging power of a “military-industrial complex.”

Biden spoke from the Oval Office, the most intimate setting a president can use to address the nation. Sitting at the Resolute desk, he was serious and subdued and earnest, stumbling on a few words. He spoke directly to the camera except at the end, when he acknowledged first lady Jill Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris and a few others gathered to the side of the room, out of the camera range.

His tenure will forever be bookended by Trump’s two terms, only the second time in American history that a president’s terms aren’t consecutive. Trump already has declared his intention to reverse many of his predecessor’s signature initiatives, from climate programs to support for Ukraine against Russia, at a cost of the legacy Biden hopes to leave.

Even Biden’s final big achievement, the Israel-Hamas ceasefire reached Wednesday that his administration had been pursuing for more than year, came with a stamp from Trump. The president-elect’s demands for a deal before his inauguration Monday provided a final push that may have helped get it over the finish line.

“This EPIC ceasefire agreement could have only happened as a result of our Historic Victory in November,” Trump bragged in a post on Truth Social that didn’t mention Biden’s name and was posted before the president had announced it.

More:In exclusive sit-down, Biden reveals his biggest regret and the compliment Trump gave him

When he did speak in the afternoon, Biden acknowledged “coordination” with “the incoming team,” but when a reporter asked whether he or Trump deserved the credit, he turned and replied with an edge, “Is that a joke?”

A skeptical public

Biden faces an uphill task in persuading the public that he is leaving a positive and consequential record, even a transformative one. In his evening address, he said he had led “through one of the toughest periods in our nation’s history,” starting with a “once-in-a-century pandemic.”

But as he retires after a half-century in public office, just 44% of Americans approved of the job he is doing, according to a USA TODAY/Suffolk University poll taken last week, while 55% disapproved. Five percent said he would be remembered as a “great” president, the survey found; 44% said he would be seen as a “failed” president.

History’s judgment may kinder, Biden hopes.

“You know, it will take time to feel the full impact of all we’ve done together,” he said in his speech. “But the seeds are planted, and they’ll grow and they’ll bloom for decades to come.”

He didn’t offer a laundry list of his accomplishments in office, as some thought he would do, and he didn’t signal what sort of role he might play in the national debate in the future.

“Now it’s your turn to stand guard,” he said to those watching the televised address.