There’s only one person responsible for the failure of Build Back Better: President Joe Biden.

His massive $2 trillion spending bill won’t ever pass, as Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin made it clear this weekend. Manchin won’t vote for it, and without him, the bill is dead on arrival in the Senate. But that’s not Manchin’s problem. He made it clear from the beginning that he wouldn’t support a bill with an unjustifiable price tag — especially not with inflation on the rise.

It was Biden’s job to convince Manchin otherwise or propose a compromise with which the West Virginia Democrat would feel comfortable. Biden refused, ignoring Manchin’s requests and catering to the Democratic Party’s leftists instead. He put a controversial paid medical and family leave policy back into the bill after agreeing to cut it and dismissed Manchin’s concerns about the bill’s cost by absurdly claiming Build Back Better would pay for itself.

Biden seems to have hoped that leftist pressure on Manchin would have forced the senator to relent. You would think Biden, who has been a Democratic Party leader for decades, would know his colleagues a bit better. Manchin has never cared about what the “Squad” thinks. He cares about getting reelected in a red state in which 74% of residents opposed Build Back Better in its current form.

But Biden’s failure to win over Manchin is just a small part of the problem with this White House. The bigger issue is that Biden assumed his 2020 victory was a mandate to enact a sweeping, revolutionary agenda that more than half of the country doesn’t want. And he thought he could do it with only a slim majority in the House and Kamala Harris’s tiebreaking vote in the Senate. Again, Biden has been in politics for long enough to understand this was never going to work.

The White House might not see it this way, but Build Back Better’s failure is an opportunity for this administration to pivot back to reality, if it’ll take it. It’s a chance for Biden to return to his campaign pledge of moderation and focus on the issues affecting the public right now, a chance to buck the Left in preparation for the 2022 midterm elections.

After all, the public didn’t elect Biden because it wanted the next Franklin D. Roosevelt. It voted for him because it didn’t want Donald Trump. But right now, Biden is making a lot of people wonder whether Trump would have been better.