In his first sit down interview since stepping aside in the 2024 presidential race, President Joe Biden said that he concluded that staying in the contest would prove to be a “real distraction,” citing the comments of Democratic leaders on Capitol Hill who feared he would drag down other candidates.
Speaking to Robert Costa for an interview for CBS Sunday Morning, Biden said that the presidential race “would have been down the wire, but what happened was a number of my Democratic colleagues in the House and Senate thought that I was going to hurt them in the races, and I was concerned if I stayed in the race, that would be the topic you’d be interviewing me about. ‘Why did Nancy Pelosi say…? Why did someone?’ And I thought it’d be a real distraction.”
Biden added that when he ran in 2020, “I thought of myself as being a transition president. I can’t even say how old I am. It’s hard for me to get it out of my mouth, but things got moving so quickly, it didn’t happen. And the combination was that I thought there’s a critical issue for me — still is not a joke — maintaining this democracy, but I thought it was important. Because although it’s a great honor being president, I think I have an obligation to the country to do … the most important thing we can do, and that is, we must, we must, we must defeat Trump.”
Pelosi has said that she has not spoken to Biden since he dropped out of the race last month, but she has insisted that she not call one person to orchestrate an effort to get Biden to step aside. She told the New Yorker, “I never called one person, but people were calling me saying that there was a challenge there. So there had to be a change in the leadership of the campaign, or what would come next.”
In the CBS interview, Biden said that he was “not confident at all” that there will be a peaceful transition of power if Trump loses.
“If he wins …this election, watch what happens,” Biden said. “He’s a genuine danger to American security.”
Biden said that he had spoken to Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro about campaigning there, the president’s home state. “He and I are putting together a campaign tour in Pennsylvania. I’m going to be campaigning in other states as well, and I am going to do whatever Kamala thinks I can do to help most.”
The president also praised Harris’ choice of Minnesota Governor Tim Walz as her running mate, calling him “my kind of guy.” “If we grew up in the same neighborhood, we’d have been friends,” Biden said.
Biden also pushed back on questions about his health, after his performance in the June debate generated alarm among Democratic lawmakers, donors and supporters.
“All I can say is watch, that’s all,” Biden said. “Look, I had a really, really bad day in that debate because I was sick, but I have no serious problem.”
Asked how he wants history to remember his presidency, Biden said, “That he proved that democracy can work, and got us out of a pandemic. It produced the single greatest economic recovery in American history. We’re the most powerful economy in the world. We have more to do. And it demonstrated that we can pull the nation together.”
