Biden to deliver farewell address Wednesday evening, White House says

President Joe Biden will begin his last week in office with a major address foreign policy address on Monday and follow that up with a farewell address to the nation delivered from the Oval Office two days later, the White House has said.

Biden’s final address to the nation as president will be televised at 8 p.m. on Wednesday. That’s five days before he’ll travel to the U.S. Capitol with his predecessor turned successor, President-elect Donald Trump, to witness Trump’s swearing-in.

The address will be a reflection on the 46th president’s 50-plus years in national politics, beginning with his improbable victory in the 1972 Delaware Senate race as a 29-year-old unknown, leading to three decades in the upper chamber, then the vice presidency under Barack Obama, and ultimately the presidency.

He appeared to preview at least one likely topic for the speech late Friday when he took to the Roosevelt Room in the West Wing to weigh in on his administration’s economic record after yet another positive jobs report from the Labor Department made his administration the only one in American history to see jobs created during every month of his four-year term.

Biden told reporters the unprecedented progress was made by “ow and why did we make such progress? We did it by fundamentally changing the economic policy of this country after decades of trickle down economics that primarily benefited those at the very top.”

“Kamala and I — and our administration — have written a new playbook that’s growing the economy from the middle out and the bottom up, that benefits everyone,” Biden said, adding that in 10 days when Trump returns to the White House the country will “face another inflection point” at which his successor and other leaders will have to choose whether to “backslide” to economic theories that only benefited a select few.

“We’ve created jobs every single month I was in office during my presidency, we saw the lowest average unemployment rate of any administration in the last 50 years, and battling through the worldwide effects of the pandemic, Putin’s war in Ukraine and supply chain disruption, inflation rate is down nearly 2 percent,” Biden continued.

“These are simple, well established economic benchmarks that measures the strength of any economy, the success and failure of any president’s four years in office. I believe the economy I’m leaving is the best in the world, and stronger than ever for all Americans.”

The president is also set speak on his foreign policy legacy two days before his farewell address. On Monday, Biden is scheduled deliver a speech at the State Department aimed at summing up what he considers his administration’s critical work on restoring American alliances and leadership.

A senior administration official who provided information on Biden’s plans described what he viewed as the bleak situation the United States faced on the world stage as Biden grabbed the reins of government from the outgoing Trump administration, during which U.S. alliances “had been badly damaged” by the then former president, now president-elect’s decision to walk away from “agreements that made America safer.”

“Our adversaries were gaining strength. And the nation and the world were in the midst of a global pandemic,” the official added.

Biden aims to “describe how we reclaimed America’s global leadership as a force of stability, put our adversaries in a position of weakness, effectively navigated turbulence around the world and made America stronger,” the official said.

He added that Biden will highlight how he helped “reinvigorate” the NATO alliance, which expanded to 32 members in the wake of the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, and that he “stood with Israel” after the 2023 terror attacks.

The remarks will be just one of several events the administration has planned to mark Biden’s final week in office, after which he’ll close out more than a half-century in public service by attending Trump’s second inauguration to mark the peaceful transfer of power he was denied four years ago when Trump attempted to overturn his 2020 election loss.

The president’s final foreign policy speech was initially set to be delivered as a bookend to Biden’s final trip aboard as president, a visit to Rome that was scuttled to allow him to oversee the federal response to the wildfires that have devastated Los Angeles and the surrounding area.

It’s unclear to what extent he’ll discuss America’s withdrawal from Afghanistan, which he ordered in August 2021. That move, which ended America’s longest war, was largely viewed as a disaster that sent Biden’s approval ratings plummeting, from which he never recovered, particularly after 13 U.S. Marines lost their lives in a bombing at Kabul International Airport.