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President Joe Biden talked about the pressure from his fellow Democrats to leave the race as he sat down for his first interview since becoming the first sitting president in over 50 years not to seek re-election.
Speaking to Robert Costa of CBS News, Mr Biden said that while polling showed him neck and neck with Donald Trump, “a number of my Democratic colleagues in the House and Senate thought that I was going to hurt them in the races”.
“I was concerned if I stayed in the race, that would be the topic you’d be interviewing about,” he said in the intervew which aired on Sunday, adding that he had first run as a “transition president” and that maintaining democracy is a critical issue, the combination of which led to his decision.
“Although it’s a great honor being president, I think I have an obligation to the country to do what I… the most important thing you can do, and that is, we must, we must, we must defeat Trump.”
The president said his family is proud of him and when asked about his late son Beau, to whom he promised to stay engaged after his death, he said: “Whenever I have a decision that’s really hard to make, I literally ask myself, what would Beau do? … He should be sitting here being interviewed, not me. He was really a fine man.”
Mr Biden restated that he had no plans to run for the presidency in 2020, but changed his mind after seeing white supremacists demonstrating in Charlottesville in 2017, saying they saw Mr Trump as an ally in the White House.
Asked if he believed there would be a peaceful transfer of power in January 2025, the president responded: “If Trump loses I’m not confident at all. 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.”
Reflecting on his time in office, Mr Biden was asked how he would like to be remembered, and said: “He proved democracy can work. He got us out of a pandemic. He produced the single greatest economic recovery in American history. We’re the most powerful economy in the world.”
Mr Biden added: “[He] demonstrated that we can pull the nation together.”
On that same theme, the president said: “Look, democracy works, and it was very important to prove that it worked … I mean, look what we’ve been able to do. We’ve created 16 million jobs … We’ve gotten around a brief of having the private sector invest over a trillion dollars, a trillion dollars, in the American economy.”
He added: “One of the things I fought for as a senator for a long time was to change the dynamic of how we grow the economy, not from the top down, but from the bottom up. The idea of trickledown economics doesn’t work, in my view.”
Asked what he could say to those who expressed skepticism about his health and ability to be out on the campaign trail, the president said: “All I can say is, watch, that’s all. Look, I had a really, really bad day in that debate because I was sick, but I have no serious problem.”
Mr Biden confirmed he will be out campaigning for vice-president Kamala Harris and Minnesota Governor Tim Walz in the run-up to election day in November.
“I was talking to Governor [Josh] Shapiro, who’s a friend we’ve left and went to Pennsylvania, my original home state. He and I put together a campaign tour in Pennsylvania. I’m going to be campaigning in other states as well, and I’m going to do whatever Kamala thinks I can do to help most.”
