U.S. President Joe Biden says his decision to end his re-election campaign was fueled in part by an “obligation” to defeat Republican candidate Donald Trump, and that staying in the race would be a “distraction” from that mission.
In an interview with CBS News that aired Sunday — his first since dropping out of the 2024 race last month — Biden warned Trump poses a “genuine danger” to American security and democracy, and that he’s not confident there will be a peaceful transfer of power if Trump loses to Vice-President Kamala Harris, who has replaced Biden as the Democratic nominee.
He added he will do whatever he can to help Harris win, including joining her on the campaign trail — despite ongoing concerns about his age and fitness.
“All I can say is, watch,” he said when asked to respond to skeptics.
Biden added he and Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro are planning a campaign tour of the critical battleground state that’s seen by both parties as necessary to win the presidency.
“I’m going to be campaigning in other states as well,” he said. “I’m going to do whatever Kamala thinks I can do to help most.”
The White House confirmed Sunday that Biden will join Harris at an event in Maryland on Thursday to “deliver remarks on the progress they are making to lower costs for the American people.”
The event will be the first with Biden and Harris together after the president made his fateful decision to drop his re-election bid, following weeks of mounting pressure from Democrats after a disastrous debate performance against Trump.
During that time, Biden publicly dismissed the calls to step aside and pleaded for his party to come together behind him. But in private, Biden told CBS News he had begun to recognize the reality of both the polls and concerns from Democratic lawmakers.
“The polls we had showed that it was a neck-and-neck race, would have been down to the wire,” Biden said when describing how he reached his decision at his family home in Delaware as he recovered from COVID-19.
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“What happened was, a number of my Democratic colleagues in the House and Senate thought that I was gonna hurt them in (their) races. And I was concerned if I stayed in the race … it would be a real distraction.”
He added that while he had viewed himself as “a transition president” when he ran in 2020, “things got moving so quickly, it didn’t happen” — alluding to past comments he’s made that he felt he needed to continue pursuing his agenda himself in a second term.
Ultimately, Biden said, “I thought the critical issue for me still is — not a joke — maintaining this democracy. I thought it was important, because although it’s a great honour being president, I think I have an obligation to the country to do what (is) the most important thing you can do, and that is we must, we must, we must defeat Trump.”
Biden still insisted in Sunday’s interview that the debate, which thrust the issue of Biden’s advancing age into the spotlight, was “a really, really bad day … because I was sick, but I have no serious (health) problem.”
Since Biden announced his decision on July 21, Democrats have rallied around Harris, who has seen a surge in enthusiasm that Biden was unable to muster as a candidate.
An Ipsos/Reuters poll released Thursday found Harris now leads Trump by five points nationally, while the New York Times released results of a poll with Siena College on Saturday that shows Harris leading 50-46 in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin — all key swing states that Biden had been struggling in.
Biden said he still believes he has a strong record as president that Harris can build on, including presiding over a post-pandemic economic recovery and historic investments in infrastructure. But polls had suggested voters didn’t agree, and instead blamed Biden for rising inflation and cost of living.
“One of the problems is, I knew all the things we did were going to take a little time to work their way through,” he said. “So now, people are realizing, ‘Oh, that highway, oh, that—’
“The biggest mistake we made, we didn’t put up signs saying, ‘Joe did it!'”
Biden first explained his decision to leave the race in an Oval Office address three days after his initial announcement, with his family watching from inside the room.
Asked what he told them afterwards, Biden replied, “It’s what they said to me. … They said they were proud, and it mattered to me a lot.”
He also reflected on his son Beau, who died in 2015, and the promise the elder Biden made to Beau to “stay engaged.”
Sunday’s interview aired a day before the seventh anniversary of white supremacist demonstrations in Charlottesville, Va., which turned deadly when civil rights activist Heather Heyer was murdered by a rally participant who intentionally drove his car into the crowd. The U.S. Justice Department has called the attack an act of domestic terrorism, and the man responsible plead guilty to federal hate crime charges.
Biden has often said that moment — and Trump’s comments a day later that there were “very fine people on both sides” of the violence that day — influenced his decision to run for the presidency, after previously deciding not to.
The president said in Sunday’s interview that there was a thoughline between Trump’s rhetoric then defending the white supremacist demonstrators and his promises to pardon people convicted for participating in the violent attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
“If Trump wins … I mean, if Trump loses, I’m not confident at all” that there will be a peaceful transfer of power, Biden said.
“He means what he says. We don’t take him seriously. He means it. All the stuff about, ‘If we lose, it’ll be a bloodbath’ … You can’t love your country only when you win.”
Trump and his campaign have said he was speaking about economic carnage when he warned of a “bloodbath” during remarks about U.S. auto manufacturing and electric vehicles at a campaign rally in March.
Biden warned world history is at “an inflection point,” making the next three to four years critical to “what the next six decades looks like.”
“Mark my words: if (Trump) wins this nomination — I mean, excuse me, this election — watch what happens. It’s a danger. He’s a genuine danger to American security.”
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