Joe Biden tells BBC Donald Trump is appeasing Russia
In an interview with the BBC’s Nick Robinson, President Joe Biden suggests President Donald Trump is appeasing Russia.
Former President Joe Biden rebuffed criticism that he waited too long to drop out of the 2024 campaign in a special live interview Thursday on “The View” and maintains he would have defeated President Donald Trump in a rematch last fall.
Biden was peppered with several questions about his decision-making in the final months of his term, his relationship with major party leaders and if he takes responsibility for Trump’s decisive victory in November.
“I do, because look, I was in charge and he won,” Biden said. “So I take responsibility.”
Biden admitted 2024 was a very tough year across the board due to the aftermath of COVID-19 and historic inflation, but that his administration failed at advertising its political wins and what they had accomplished.
Asked about former Vice President Kamala Harris’ future, Biden said he “wasn’t surprised” that she lost, blaming it on Republicans taking a “sexist route” but that he keeps in contact with his former running mate who he said asked for his advice as she weighs whether to run for president again or for governor of California.
“She has a difficult decision to make about what she’s going to do. I hope she stays fully engaged,” Biden said. “I think she’s first rate, but we have a lot of really good candidates as well.”
Biden has been making the media rounds in an attempt to rehabilitate his reputation, particularly among Democrats, ahead of two highly anticipated books excavating his administration’s efforts to downplay concerns about his age and acuity that many believe hobbled Democrats in 2024.
“Original Sin” written by Axios’ Alex Thompson and CNN’s Jake Tapper, is set to release on May 20. It is being promoted as an “unsettling” account of how Biden, his family and senior White House aides mislead allies and the public about the former president’s “condition and limitations.”
Another book, “2024: How Trump Retook the White House and the Democrats Lost America” which is scheduled to be released on July 8, reveals that top aides considered having Biden take a cognitive test to demonstrate his fitness to serve a second term, but that idea was eventually dropped, the New York Times reported.
Journalists Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes released a book in April, “Fight: Inside the Wildest Battle for the White House,” that also documents the Biden administration’s efforts to cover the president’s decline.
“I think a lot of people who will read this book will be surprised and, on the left, be saddened at the degree to which Joe Biden put himself above the interests of his party and ultimately … from the Democratic point of view, the interests of the country,” Allen told USA TODAY in April.
‘Worst 100 days’: Biden defends his legacy, attacks Trump
Biden’s return to the public stage, starting with a roughly 30-minute speech last month, has largely served two goals: fixing his reputation and attacking Trump.
The former president has hired a well-known Democratic operative to help with the former, while rebuking the current administration for eliminating 7,000 employees in the Social Security Administration’s workforce, while addressing a conference of disability advocates during an April 15 speech in Chicago.
In an exclusive interview with the BBC earlier this week, Biden slammed Trump for pressuring Ukraine to surrender territory to Russia, calling it “modern-day appeasement” that will fuel uncertainty in American leadership among European allies.
Asked about Trump’s return to power on Thursday, Biden jabbed the current president on several fronts from domestic to international affairs.
“Let me put it this way, he’s had the worst 100 days any presidents ever had, and I would not say honesty has been his strong point,” Biden said of his Republican rival.
Trump hasn’t shied away from bashing Biden in speeches, online posts and executive orders either. And the White House hasn’t backed down in the face of the former president’s criticisms, as the two remain locked in a nasty feud.
The Trump administration is reportedly, for example, planning to release audio of Biden’s interview with Robert Hur, the special counsel who investigated his handling of classified documents and released a report last year calling attention to Biden’s mental acuity.
“Joe Biden is a complete disgrace to this country and the office he occupied,” White House communications Steven Cheung said in an May 7 post on X. “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.”
Asked why Trump brings him up so much, Biden told hosts of the ABC show: “I beat him.”
‘So-called friends’: Bidens address frayed relationship with Democratic allies
One lingering issue for Biden is his relationship with fellow Democrats, who remain divided about the former president’s role in the 2024 campaign.
Joined on the show by his wife, former first lady Jill Biden, the two were asked about the misgivings fellow Democrats reportedly had about him being able to serve another four years, including from longtime allies such as former Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a decades old friend who heavily lobbied for him to exit the race.
“The only reason I got out of the race was because I didn’t want to have a divided Democratic Party,” Joe Biden said.
The former president said rank-and-file Democrats didn’t buy into the idea of him dropping out due to his age, even after his disastrous debate performance against Trump last June. But he said that Democratic donors and leadership weren’t as supportive and that the narrative “took on a life of its own.”
“When I left the race, Kamala had hundreds of millions of dollars,” he said. “She had the best organized through our campaign, every organization, every state was organized.”
Jill Biden, who sat next to her husband for the second half of the hourlong interview, admitted he faltered but that they weren’t going to let a bad 90-minute debate define his decades of public service. She said the people writing books about President Biden’s cognitive abilities, “were not in the White House with us, and they didn’t see how hard Joe worked every single day.”
The former first lady, who has been open about the fractured ties with Pelosi and others, also rebuffed reporting that she helped build a “cocoon” around her husband to conceal suspicion about his decline.
“It was very hurtful,” Jill Biden said. “It was very hurtful, especially from some of our so-called friends.”
Contributing: Joey Garrison, Clare Mulroy, Savannah Kuchar, Bart Jansen
