The Scene
Joe Biden mounted an unusual mini-media blitz this week to revisit an argument few in his party want to join: that he would’ve won reelection, had he not abandoned his 2024 campaign.
President Donald Trump “still got 7 million fewer votes,” Biden told the hosts of ABC’s The View, referring to his popular vote margin in the 2020 election. “A lot of people didn’t show up.”
It was Biden’s second interview of the week, at odds with how most former presidents not named Trump have politicked after leaving office. And it was the second time since November that Biden suggested he could have done what Kamala Harris didn’t; back in January, Biden told USA Today that, “based on the polling,” he could have beaten Trump a second time.
He elaborated on that with the sympathetic hosts on The View, contending that the race “was very close in those toss-up states.”
Biden did take responsibility for his vice president’s loss in November: “I was in charge and he won,” he said. But he also absolved himself for an error Harris had made in that very same studio, in one of her first long interviews as a presidential candidate.
When asked by The View co-host Sunny Hostin what she would have done differently than Biden, Harris replied that “nothing comes to mind.” Biden said on Thursday that “I did not advise her to say that.” (According to reporting by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes, published in their book Fight, Biden had told her, weeks earlier, to put “no daylight” between them.)
Biden went on during his Thursday interview to describe a winnable election that was lost by factors out of his control.
“We weren’t quite as good as he was about advertising,” he argued. He saw sexism playing a factor in Harris’ loss: “I’ve never seen quite as successful, and a consistent, campaign undercutting the notion that a woman couldn’t lead the country.”
Earlier in the week, in an interview with the BBC, Biden described his choice on reelection differently. “Things moved so quickly that it made it difficult to walk away,” he told Nick Robertson. “It was a hard decision.”
Pressed on whether he should have quit the race earlier, he said that he didn’t “know how that would have made much difference.”
David’s view
America’s second Catholic president picked a rough week for a media tour. To the delight of Democrats I talked to on Thursday, Biden’s interview was shunted out of the news cycle by the election of Leo XIV, the first American pope.
They don’t want to criticize Biden on the record. They don’t want to praise him on the record. They expect to confront this topic again, against their will, when Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson’s book Original Sin lands in 12 days.
But senior party members don’t typically have to say much about their former presidents, because those men have avoided the fray after the final trip to Joint Base Andrews. George W. Bush, who left office with approval ratings in the mid-30s, largely disappeared from political life; he didn’t campaign for any candidate in public until a 2016 rally for his brother Jeb.
Barack Obama re-emerged 93 days into Trump’s first term with a non-political interview about volunteerism; he resisted talking about his successor until he started campaigning for Democrats.
“You’ll notice I haven’t been commenting a lot on politics lately,” Obama said in October 2017, rallying for Democratic candidates in Virginia — criticizing Trump’s record, but not using his name.
Trump, just the second president to lose reelection then come back for a second term, broke the old “elder statesman” norms. But he did so as the rarely-disputed leader of his party. At this point four years ago, just weeks after the Capitol riot, ambitious Republicans were already traveling to Mar-a-Lago to get Trump’s endorsement.
No Democrat has campaigned with Biden, who in February offered to help the party with whatever it needed. His first post-presidency political speech was to a crowd of 200 Social Security advocates; Trump’s was to a crowd of more than a thousand GOP activists at the 2021 Conservative Political Action Conference.
In the meantime, the Trump administration has humiliated Biden. His predecessor/successor frequently jokes about the competence and age of the “worst president” in American history.
“Remember when the bunny took Joe Biden out?” Trump said at this year’s Easter Egg Roll, referencing a clip from the 2022 event when an aide in an Easter Bunny costume ushered the president away from reporters.
Trump has ended Biden’s security briefings, ended Secret Service protection of his adult children, and is reportedly planning to release the audio of Biden’s interview with former special counsel Robert Hur, a Republican demand rebuffed by the Biden administration. Hur’s initial memo, and a transcript of the interview, amplified questions about Biden’s ability to serve another term.
(That story says everything about the two presidents’ fortunes: What began as an investigation into Trump’s handling of classified documents grew into a damaging probe of Biden’s treatment of documents after leaving the vice presidency.)
Democrats have criticized that behavior by Trump. But they have not jumped in to defend Biden, or agree with his analysis that he could have done better than Harris. (Party lawmakers in tough races led the charge for Biden to quit, partly because their polling showed him collapsing and putting new seats into play for Republicans.)
The governors with the most obvious designs on the 2028 nomination have been the most cautious about how they tackled the age question, largely sticking to the argument that Trump is nearly as old as Biden and the fateful debate that ended Biden’s campaign was a “bad night.” That is still Biden’s line, too.
“I had a bad, bad night,” he told ABC on Thursday. “But even after that, the polls just showed me down by 2 points.”
Jill Biden, who joined her husband on the set, said that they knew he’d “screwed up” the debate with Trump, but “we were not going to let 90 minutes of a debate define his presidency and all those years of service.”
This sounds like delusion to most Democrats, when they’re speaking candidly (though, of course, they rarely do so about Biden on the record).
And Biden’s assessment of Trump’s second term in his BBC interview didn’t sound much better. Asked if he believed that democracy was at risk, as he did in 2024, Biden said he was getting less worried because “the Republican Party is waking up to what Trump is about.”
Six years ago, this month, Biden predicted that Republicans would undergo an “epiphany” if Trump lost the 2020 election.
The View From Republicans
Biden took specific shots at Trump in his interviews, from the president’s negotiations with Russia to the claim that Biden’s final executive orders could be nullified. But the White House ignored those specifics and ridiculed the former president.
“Joe Biden is a complete disgrace to this country and the office he occupied,” White House communications director Steven Cheung said of Thursday’s interview. “He has clearly lost all mental faculties and his handlers thought it’d be a good idea for him to do an interview and incoherently mumble his way through every answer. Sadly, this feels like abuse.”
Room for Disagreement
At least one prominent Democrat has publicly disagreed with Biden’s assessment that he should have stayed in the race and could have won.
In an interview with Semafor’s Mixed Signals podcast, Biden’s first White House press secretary said it was a mistake for the president to seek re-election.
“Of course,” Jen Psaki told Ben Smith and Max Tani. “A lot of his legacy has become, for at least this period of time, based around this question of him running for reelection, not being aware or not being honest with himself about being able to do another full term.”
Notable
- Last month, Semafor looked at how Sen. Bernie Sanders, who praised Biden’s progressive wins during his presidency, had stopped talking about him and said that Democrats “turned their backs” on the working class.
- In his Morning Meeting show on Thursday, Mark Halperin suggested that Biden was becoming more visible because “Biden, Inc. has collapsed,” and his family is struggling to make money. “The trough is empty. The spigot is turned off.”