Former President Joseph R. Biden said he doesn’t think it would’ve made a difference if he had dropped out of the 2024 presidential race sooner and passed the baton to another candidate.
Mr. Biden quit campaigning less than four months before the November election, opening the way for Vice President Kamala Harris to run at the top of the Democratic ticket.
“I don’t think it would have mattered. We left at a time when we had a good candidate,” Mr. Biden told BBC Radio 4’s “Today” in an interview released Wednesday.
“Things moved so quickly that it made it difficult to walk away. And it was a hard decision,” he said. “I think it was the right decision. I think that … it was just a difficult decision.”
Mr. Biden, 82, would’ve been 86 at the end of his second term if he had won. It was his incoherent performance during the June presidential debate that had people calling for his ouster from the ticket.
Ms. Harris took over the campaign but lost to President Trump.
Still, Mr. Biden maintained in the interview that Ms. Harris was a “good candidate.”
“She was fully funded, and what happened was, what we had set out to do, no one thought we could do,” he said. “We had become so successful in our agenda, it was hard to say, ‘I’m gonna stop now.’”
He said that he “meant what he said” about serving only one term and “preparing to hand this to the next generation. But things moved so quickly that it made it difficult to walk away.”
In a January interview with USA Today before leaving office, Mr. Biden said he could have won a second term against Mr. Trump if he had stayed in the race.
The BBC interview, which was filmed with Mr. Biden in Wilmington, Delaware, to mark the 80th anniversary of World War II’s end, also touched on how he thinks Mr. Trump is handling his second term.
He slammed Mr. Trump for how he is treating America’s allies, particularly when the president suggests taking Canada, Greenland and the Panama Canal.
“What the hell’s going on here? What president ever talks like that? That’s not who we are,” Mr. Biden said. “We’re about freedom, democracy, opportunity, not about confiscation.”
Mr. Biden said Mr. Trump’s handling of the war between Russia and Ukraine is “modern-day appeasement” because the administration suggests Ukraine must give up some territory to bring peace.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has said his country can’t accept giving up Crimea, but Mr. Trump and Vice President J.D. Vance say there may be no other way.
Mr. Biden said he doesn’t see the strategy in allowing “a dictator, a thug, to decide he’s going to take significant portions of land that aren’t his, that that’s going to satisfy him. I don’t quite understand.”
