Joe Biden knifed his VP on live television Thursday.
The former president told The View he was “not surprised” his one-time running mate lost the 2024 presidential election to Donald Trump and insisted that, had he remained at the top of the ticket, he would have won on Election Day.
“A lot of people didn’t show up,” Biden said, referring to a 3 million voter decrease in 2024 compared to four years prior.
A mumbling Biden, 82, also reminded panelists he received 7 million more votes than Trump did in 2020, suggesting that he would have repeated that performance on Nov. 5 despite widespread concerns about his cognitive abilities.
Questions about Biden’s mental acuity emerged as a Trump attack point as far back as early 2023. However, top names in the Democratic Party only began expressing similar concerns publicly after Biden’s disastrous presidential debate on June 27, 2024.
Biden said he knew immediately that he had had a poor debate performance. He chalked up the “terrible night” to his being sick, which he acknowledged is “no excuse.” Still, he said he felt he was the best person to defeat Trump, and Jill Biden said on The View that a single bad night should not have ended a decades-long political career as it did.
“I went onto the stage after the debate. I mean, we all saw it. It was terrible,” Jill Biden told the panel. “And so Joe looked at me, and he said, ‘Well, I screwed up.’”
She continued, “I said, ‘Yeah, you did, Joe, but we have hundreds of people waiting for us. Put your shoulders back, walk out there, be who you are.’ We were not going to let 90 minutes of a debate define his presidency and all those years of service.”
Biden explained that he left the race not because he feared losing to Trump but because he did not want the Democratic Party to be fractured on Election Day.
“I think that the only reason I got out of the race was because I didn’t want to have a divided Democratic Party,” he said. “It’s a simple proposition, and so that’s why I got out of the race. I thought it was better to put the country ahead of my interest, my personal interest. I’m not being facetious. I’m being dead serious about that.”
Asked about reports claiming he instructed Harris not to break with him on policy, Biden told The View they were untrue. One of Harris’ most criticized campaign moments came when she told The View that she could not come up with anything she would do differently during the Biden administration’s four years.
“I did not advise her to say that,” Biden said Thursday.
Biden said it was important for Harris to be her own person, and “she was.” While he made subtle digs that he would have outperformed Harris at the ballot box, he spoke glowingly about his running mate and claimed they are still in close contact. He added that she was “qualified to be president of the United States of America” but lost because of how much the Trump campaign fixated on her race and gender.
The former president was not so kind to his successor. He called Trump’s first 100 days the worst in U.S. history by any president and said Harris’ defeat was a blow to liberal democracy.
“Liberal democracies all across America, all across the world lost last time,” Biden said. “I think we underestimate the phenomenal negative impact that COVID had and the pandemic had on people, on attitudes, on optimism, on a whole range of things.”
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