During his first interview after announcing he will no longer be seeking reelection in November, President Joe Biden said to CBS that he dropped out of the race after receiving pressure from Democrats in the House and the Senate.
“The polls we had showed it was a neck-and-neck race, it would have been down to the wire,” the Democratic president told CBS News’ Robert Costa in an exclusive pre-recorded one-on-one conversation first aired today.
“But what happened was a number of my Democratic colleagues in the House and the Senate thought that I was going to hurt them in the races,” Biden explained. “And I was concerned that if I stayed in the race that would be the topic you’d be interviewing me about[…]And I thought it would be a real distraction.”
Biden added that when he ran in 2020 he intended to be a “transition president” only, but “things got moving for me so quickly,” he added. “I can’t even say how old I am, it’s hard for me to get it outta my mouth.”
Talking about the disastrous televised debate against Trump that triggered calls from Democrats for him to withdraw from the election, Biden reiterated that he felt sick that day.
Immediately after the June 27 debate, Biden and the White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre put his poor performance on the day down to having “a really bad cold.” But similar attempts to quell anxieties, including more forceful rallies, failed to reassure Democrats that his shaky debate performance could be attributed to a “bad night.”
On July 21, after several prominent Democrats had called for him to withdraw from the race, Biden announced he was ending his reelection campaign with a letter posted on X, writing that his decision was “in the best interest of my party and the country.” Soon after, he endorsed his vice president Kamala Harris to replace him on the presidential ticket.
At the time he was recovering from COVID-19 at his Rehoboth Beach vacation home in Delaware with his wife, first lady Jill Biden. Only a small circle of people was informed of his historic decision before he announced it on social media.
“A critical issue for me still, not a joke, is maintaining this democracy,” he told CBS, explaining why he abandoned his bid for reelection. “Although it’s a great honor being president, I think I have an obligation to the country to do the most important thing I can do, and that is, we must defeat Trump,” Biden told Costa.
He later added a warning against Trump potentially returning to the Oval Office, calling him a real threat to the country. “Mark my words,” he said. “Watch what happens. It’s a danger. He’s a genuine danger to American security.”
Asked whether he feared a difficult transfer of power after the November election, Biden said he did if Trump loses.
“All the stuff about ‘If I lose it will be a bloodbath,’ he means what he says, we don’t take him seriously,” he said.
Biden said he wishes to be remembered in the future as a president who “proved that democracy can work,” who got the country out of the COVID-19 pandemic, who led the “singlest greatest economic recovery in American history” and “demonstrated we can pull a nation together.”
He told Costa: “I’ve always believed, and I still do, the American people are good and decent, honorable people. When I announced my candidacy to run way back for president, I said, ‘We’ve got to do three things: restore the soul of America; build the economy from the middle out and the bottom up, not the top down; and bring the country together.’
“No one thought we could get done—including some of my own people—what we got done. The biggest mistake we made, we didn’t put up signs saying, ‘Joe did it!'” he added, laughing.
Biden said he will be on the campaign trail supporting the Harris-Walz ticket, adding that Tim Walz, the Minnesota governor, is “my kind of guy” and the duo is “a hell of a team.”
