More than two years after his disastrous debate performance prompted a Democratic push to urge him to abandon his re-election campaign, former President Joseph R. Biden Jr. declared the debate was “not very consequential.”
Mr. Biden’s assessment, in an interview with People magazine published on Wednesday, runs counter to widely held views of the debate and its aftermath, in which Mr. Biden scrambled for nearly a month to try to convince fellow Democrats he was up for the job of running against Donald J. Trump again in 2024.
“I don’t know anybody who hasn’t made a mistake in a debate,” Mr. Biden, 83, said in the interview. “To me, it was not very consequential. First of all, I thought there’d be another debate, which there wasn’t. But notwithstanding the fact that there wasn’t another debate, it didn’t disturb me because it wasn’t consequential.”
Though Mr. Biden eventually bowed out of the race, he has continued to force a national reassessment of his choice to run again when polls showed Americans did not want him to.
The interview with People, ahead of a memoir to be released on Tuesday, comes as Mr. Biden is seeking to repair a legacy tarnished by Mr. Trump’s 2024 victory and subsequent actions rolling back some of Mr. Biden’s policy achievements.
Calls for Mr. Biden to withdraw from his re-election campaign began almost immediately after the June 2024 debate, in which he repeatedly lost his train of thought and faced questions about his age and acuity. Mr. Biden has never publicly conceded that he was ill-prepared to debate or that he should not have run for president again, and he maintained that stance in the new interview.
Speaking in a low, raspy voice to People, which published video of the interview online, Mr. Biden, whose office said he was diagnosed with an aggressive form of prostate cancer in May 2025, described his cancer treatment and said that he was not aware that he had cancer while serving as president. He said that had he known, he would have left office and ended his campaign.
“If I had known that I was feeling lousy because I had cancer, I would have resigned,” Mr. Biden said. “I would’ve not gone forward, because I don’t think an 80-year-old man with cancer should be running.”
In the video interview with People, Mr. Biden’s wife, Dr. Jill Biden, suggested that Mr. Biden was on the verge of not seeking re-election before Democrats outperformed expectations in the 2022 midterm elections.
“Joe had thought, ‘You know, I’ll get out,’” Dr. Biden said. “But in 2023, after the Democrats had won the midterms, everybody kept saying, ‘No, you won the midterms.’”
Mr. Biden expressed no regrets about mounting a re-election campaign that Democrats now widely view as a mistake given his age.
“I believe that on an objective basis, I was the best-equipped person to do the job,” he said.
Mr. Biden announced on Sunday that his health would limit the amount of promotional activity he was able to do for his book, which is titled “Promise Me, America.”
Mr. Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, during a podcast interview in July, blamed as-yet undiagnosed cancer for his father’s abysmal debate performance. Medical experts who were not involved in Mr. Biden’s care said it was unlikely that his debate performance was affected by the cancer diagnosed months later.
Dr. Biden, in her People interview, acknowledged that her husband’s political legacy has been tarnished by Mr. Trump’s victory over Vice President Kamala Harris in 2024, who replaced Mr. Biden as the nominee, and the subsequent rollback of many policies enacted during the Biden administration.
“I hope that history tells the true story of all of his years in office, as a senator, as vice president and then as president,” she said. “I do think when history is written, the true story will be told and people will realize not only what a great president he is but what a great man he is.”
Mr. Biden said to People that “the greatest threat to humanity now is the environment” and called on Democrats who won in this year’s midterm elections to reinstate climate policies he enacted that Mr. Trump and Republicans have since rescinded.
“We were able to pass the most extensive climate protection policies in all of history, and then along came Trump and he ripped them all out,” Mr. Biden said. “My hope is, with this last election, the Democrats are going to come back and put those back in place.”
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