When his disastrous debate performance against Donald Trump forced him to withdraw from the 2024 election last July, President Joe Biden told Americans he’d decided that the “best way forward” for the country was for him to “pass the torch to a new generation” by standing down and endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris.
Now, with fewer than two weeks remaining until he leaves the White House for the final time as president, Biden says he’s not sure if he’d have been able to make it through the second term he had sought for so long.
“So far, so good,” he said. “But who knows what I’m going to be when I’m 86 years old?”
In an hour-long interview with USA Today, Biden defended his administration's record and maintained that he still believes he could have done what Harris could not by defeating Trump a second time in last November’s electoral contest.
“It’s presumptuous to say that, but I think yes,” he said.
The president said he based that view on polling data that he’d reviewed, though nearly all publicly available polling at the time showed him losing badly to Trump.
At the time, a series of verbal gaffes and high-profile flubs had raised questions about his continued competence, and his slow, shuffling gait — which his doctors have attributed to spinal arthritis— made him appear far less vigorous than Trump, who is only four years younger than the man he’ll replace later this month.
Contemporaneous polling also showed how a majority of Americans did not believe he had the mental or physical stamina to serve in the nation’s highest office.
And while Biden maintains he could’ve defeated Trump had he stayed in the race, he was more sanguine about whether he could’ve made it through a second term that would’ve ended with him at nearly 90 years of age.
“When Trump was running again for re-election [in 2020] I really thought I had the best chance of beating him. But I also wasn’t looking to be president when I was 85 years old, 86 years old. And so I did talk about passing the baton,” said Biden who also recalled how he’d intended to step away from electoral politics after the death of his eldest son, Beau Biden, from brain cancer in 2015.
Asked about whether he could’ve made it through that second term he’d initially sought, Biden replied: “Who the hell knows?”
