It wasn’t as bad as it looked. It was worse.

FILE: AP Photo/Matt Slocum

We’re coming up on 100 days since Joe Biden left office and given the stark contrast between the Biden and Trump administrations, we are coming to understand just how cosmically awful Joe Biden’s time in office really was.

It was a disaster from its first day to its last.

Even granting enormous quantities of grace, one cannot find a single Biden administration policy that made Americans safer or more prosperous. Not one. On Biden’s watch the world became more dangerous and the American middle class slipped back into the decline from which it had briefly emerged in Trump’s first term. (And please, spare me the stock market. Half of the market gain on Biden’s watch was swallowed by inflation. The rest was largely driven by the share prices of Alphabet, Meta, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, Nvidia and Tesla – the so called “Magnificent Seven.” The rest of the market barely budged.)

We don’t have time for an exhaustive analysis of the things that Biden got wrong. That exercise could legitimately be made into a semester-long three-hour college credit course. (Not holding my breath.)

Let’s just bear down on the two Biden administration policy failures that will have the longest lasting negative consequences.

The first – surprise, surprise – is Biden’s catastrophic border policy. We’ll never know exactly how many illegal migrants Joe Biden allowed to invade our country. Estimates range from eight to 15 million. Whatever that unknowable number, it’s horrific. No nation has ever allowed chaotic mass migration on anything close to such a scale. As a result, there is no template for what happens next.

We already know that the resulting pressure on social services, schools, hospitals and police departments has been overwhelming. There’s no practical way to get these migrants out of the country and there is no effort whatsoever to assimilate them into American culture. Their presence is a large-scale balkanizing force, the staggering social costs of which will be borne by generations yet to come.

The second cosmic disaster is Biden’s reckless spending. When taken together, his “American Rescue Plan,” the “Infrastructure Investment & Jobs Act” and the ironically named, “Inflation Reduction Act” total up to $6 trillion in spending that an already deeply indebted nation can ill afford. None of these spending boondoggles accomplished any of their stated goals. They only added to an already unsustainable debt.

There are two lessons to be learned from Biden’s terrible presidency.

Lesson one is keep Democrats out of office. Today’s Democrats — as embodied in Joe Biden — will blindly promote increasing the scope of government no matter how often or to what degree government makes things demonstrably worse.

Lesson two is that today’s Democrats aren’t about effective governance anyway. Nor are they about the poor or the middle class or “hard working Americans” or any other group to which they endlessly pander.

Democrats are about Democrats. They’re about power (and the concomitant money).

Which leads to a third lesson. As bad as Biden was, given what the party has become, the next Democrat to win the White House won’t be appreciably better.