Biden says he dropped out to avoid becoming a ‘distraction’ for Democrats

WASHINGTON – President Joe Biden said in an interview that aired Sunday that he abandoned his bid for a second term because he did not want to create “a real distraction” for Democrats, but he expressed no second thoughts about whether he could still do the job, despite concerns about his age and capacity.

In his first interview since ending his re-election campaign July 21, Biden said that he had “no serious problem” with his health but added that the highest priority had to be defeating former President Donald Trump. “We must, we must, we must defeat Trump,” he told Robert Costa on “CBS Sunday Morning.”

The president attributed his decision to step aside to pressure from his own party but did not offer new details about the dramatic days leading up to his stunning announcement. “A number of my Democratic colleagues in the House and Senate thought that I was going to hurt them in the races,” he said. “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, why did so – and I thought it’d be a real distraction.”

He said that he initially intended to be a bridge to the next generation in running for president in 2020. “When I ran the first time, I thought of myself as being a transition president,” he said. “I can’t even say how old I am. It’s hard for me to get it out of my mouth. But things got moving so quickly, it didn’t happen.”

Even though he would have been 86 at the end of a second term had he won again, Biden suggested that he had originally resolved to seek re-election because he saw Trump as a singular threat who had to be stopped. He cited the former president’s support from white supremacists and referred to the deadly demonstrations in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017 that he has said inspired him to run in 2020.

“Every other time the Ku Klux Klan has been involved, they wore hoods so they’re not identified,” Biden said. “Under his presidency, they came out of those woods with no hoods, knowing they had an ally. That’s how I read it. They knew they had an ally in the White House. And he stepped up for them.”

The president vowed to campaign for Vice President Kamala Harris and praised her choice of Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota as her running mate. “He’s a great guy,” he said. “As we say, if we grew up in the same neighborhood, we’d have been friends. He’s my kind of guy. He’s real. He’s smart. I’ve known him for several decades. I think it’s a hell of a team.”

He denied that his poor debate performance that led Democrats to pressure him to step aside revealed any larger issues about his capacity at age 81. “Look, I had a really, really bad day in that debate because I was sick,” he said. “But I have no serious problem.”

As for his own legacy, Biden said he hoped it would be that he “proved democracy can work,” “got us out of a pandemic” and “produced the single greatest economic recovery in American history.”

But he did express some regret for not doing more to take credit for the expansive $1 trillion bipartisan program to rebuild the nation’s roads, bridges, airports and other infrastructure. “The biggest mistake we made,” he said, was that “we didn’t put up signs saying, ‘Joe did it.’ ”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.