Almost immediately after President-elect Donald Trump defeated Vice President Kamala Harris for the presidency, the Democratic finger-pointing and blame game over who was most responsible for the devastating electoral loss began.

Much of the criticism has been aimed at President Joe Biden, including by his own supportive biographer, who said the Harris loss will prove to be an "asterisk" on Biden's historic "legacy," according to Fox News.

Of course, devoted aides and supporters of Biden have pushed back sharply and tried to shift the blame toward Harris and, rather predictably, many Democrats are also harshly criticizing the tens of millions of American voters who rejected them in favor of Trump and Republicans.

Biden's "legacy" will now be "the return of Donald Trump"

Franklin Foer, a staff writer for The Atlantic who also authored President Biden's biography, published a piece on Thursday titled "Why Biden’s Team Thinks Harris Lost," which was largely based on the unprovable and likely false assumption that Biden would have fared better against former President Trump if he had remained the nominee.

"Earlier this fall, one of Joe Biden’s closest aides felt compelled to tell the president a hard truth about Kamala Harris’s run for the presidency: 'You have more to lose than she does.' And now he’s lost it," Foer wrote. "Joe Biden cannot escape the fact that his four years in office paved the way for the return of Donald Trump. This is his legacy. Everything else is an asterisk."

The author shared what he'd learned from Biden's "inner circle" in the aftermath of the election and found that "Members of Biden’s clan continue to stoke the delusion that its paterfamilias would have won the election, and some of his advisers feared that he might publicly voice that deeply misguided view."

"Bidenland" blames Harris and her campaign

To be sure, none of the people Foer talked to were directly negative about VP Harris herself, but they had plenty of criticism for the way she handled her campaign, including inexplicable shifts in messaging that were initially working and not pushing back sufficiently against the Trump campaign's framing of the candidate as a "woke" progressive.

Amid the critiques from "Bidenland" was the constant refrain that, had he not dropped out of the race, President Biden would have done things differently and defeated his 2020 rival a second time.

"A sour irony haunts Biden aides," Foer wrote. "In the coming months, Trump will use executive power and unified control of Washington to wreck many of the administration’s proudest accomplishments. But the ones he doesn’t wreck, he will claim as his own."

"Biden helped build the foundations for economic growth, with the Inflation Reduction Act, the CHIPS Act, and the infrastructure bill. Because the investments enabled by all three of those bills will take years to bear fruit, Biden never had the chance to reap the harvest," he concluded. "Despite Trump’s opposition to those pieces of legislation, the benefits of those bills could bolster his presidency. Biden will have passed along his most substantive legacy as a gift to his successor."

Democrats broadly blame Biden for Harris loss

Meanwhile, as President Biden's aides and closest supporters point the finger of blame at VP Harris and her campaign, Politico reported that a multitude of Democrats, including elected lawmakers, advisors, pollsters, and strategists, were pointing their own fingers back at Biden as being most at fault for Harris' loss.

The consistent complaint there was that Biden should have realized he had no chance to win against Trump and should have never run for a second term -- a re-election campaign based on "pride and ego" and "arrogance" that paved the way for Trump to make a triumphant and decisive return to the White House.

Instead, Biden's critics say, the elderly and the hugely unpopular president should have stepped aside much earlier and allowed the Democratic Party to hold a real primary contest to choose his successor, who may or may have been Harris -- and who still may or may not have defeated Trump, no matter how much time they had to prepare.

"The loss, said supporters and critics alike, will put a lasting dent in a legacy that Biden built steadily over more than a half-century in politics, culminating in what he envisioned would be a resounding defeat of Trump and his divisive brand of politics," Politico reported. "Instead, Biden’s presidency will now be inextricably linked with Trump’s return to the Oval Office and his legislative accomplishments risk getting undercut by his successor. It’s in part a consequence, some Democrats concluded, of Biden letting pride and ego cloud the sharp political judgment that had aided his long ascent to the White House."