Before President Joe Biden pulled out of the 2024 election, polls showed “that it was a neck-and-neck race, would have been down the wire,” he told “CBS Sunday Morning.” “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… and I thought it’d be a real distraction, number one.”
The second reason Biden chose to discontinue his campaign, he added, was that “when I ran the first time, I thought of myself as being a transition president.”
His age weighed heavily on Biden’s mind. “I can’t even say how old I am. It’s hard for me to get out of my mouth. But things got moving so quickly, it didn’t happen,” Biden said, adding, “the critical issue for me still — it’ss not a joke — maintaining this democracy.”
“But I thought it was important because, although it’s a great honor to be a president, I think I have an obligation to the country to do what [is] the most important thing you can do, and that is we must, we must, we must defeat Trump,” he concluded.
Biden’s family was in the Oval Office during his announcement, and were quick to tell him how proud they were of him, the president said. He also thought of his son Beau Biden, who died in 2015, and what advice he might have had. “Look, I can honestly say that I think of him all the time. Whenever I have a decision, that’s really hard to make — I literally ask myself, what would Beau do?”
“You know, Beau was committed to my staying committed. We had a conversation toward the end, when everybody, we knew he wasn’t going to live,” Biden continued. “And he said, ‘Dad, I know, we know it’s going to happen. So I’m going to be OK, Dad. I’m all right, I’m not afraid. But Dad, you’ve got to make me a promise.’ I said, ‘What’s that Beau?’ He said, ‘I know when it happens, you’re going to want to quit.’”
His son made him give his word that he would stay committed to his political career, and Biden complied. “And then that’s why I had not planned on running after he died. And then Charlottesville happened,” Biden said.
Anti-racism demonstrations in Charlottesville, Virginia turned deadly on Aug. 12, 2017, and activist Heather Heyer was killed after James Alex Fields Jr. drove his car into a group of protesters. Biden has credited the moment with inspiring him to run for office in 2020.
“When I spoke to the mom who lost her daughter, the consequence of those neo-Nazis and white supremacists coming out of fields in America with torches, carrying Nazi banners, singing the same sick, antisemitic bile that was sung in Germany in the ’30s — when her daughter was killed, the press went to the then-President Trump and said, ‘what do you think?’ He said, ‘They’re very fine people on both sides,’” Biden explained.
“I knew then, I knew I had to do something. That’s how I decided to run. Because democracy is literally at stake,” he added.
From that point on, Biden said, Trump proved every fear the opposition had about him. Of Trump’s plan to pardon Jan. 6 offenders, Biden explained, “Every other time the Ku Klux Klan has been involved they wore hoods so they’re not identified. Under his presidency, they came out of those woods with no hoods, knowing they had an ally.”
Biden also repeated his fear that if Trump loses the 2024 election, he will not accept a peaceful transfer of power in January 2025. “I mean, if Trump loses, I’m not confident at all,” Biden explained. “He means what he says, we don’t take him seriously. He means it. All the stuff about ‘if we lose, there’ll be a bloodbath.’ It’s happening, ‘a stolen election.’”
You can watch the interview with President Joe Biden in the video above.
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