The Washington Post and Politico both published retrospectives on President Joe Biden’s first year in office on Wednesday, and they both are built around a similar storyline: Biden started his term off strong, then came the collapse of Afghanistan in August, then delta, then omicron, and rising inflation to boot.

Politico writes: “The administration tried to pitch each development as a testament of their mettle — they’d ended the nation’s longest war and were confronting the virus. But for a president that had made competency central to his message to the American public, the pair of missteps was politically damaging. His poll numbers have yet to recover.”