Does Joe Biden blame his vice-president for losing the 2024 election to Donald Trump? He certainly doesn’t take any responsibility himself. And when it comes to Kamala Harris, he can’t even bring himself to say her name.
Biden sat down with the BBC’s Nick Robinson for his first full interview since leaving office. The 82-year-old ex-president was still able to speak pointedly about America’s foreign policy, warning of the dangers of appeasing Russia and abandoning Nato. But when Robinson asked Biden about dropping out of his re-election bid in mid-2024, he got tongue-tied.
Under fire now for starting a re-election campaign he couldn’t complete, Biden contended that “I meant what I said when I started” in 2020 about heading a “transition government” where he would “hand this to the next generation”. So, why didn’t he? And why didn’t it work?
That’s where Biden got increasingly incoherent. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Asked if he “regrets” not dropping out sooner to give someone else a bigger chance to beat Trump, he insisted that abandoning ship in mid-July was the right decision. “I don’t think it would have mattered” if he had dropped out earlier, he claimed.
“It was a hard decision,” yet “I think it was the right decision” to go exactly then. Never mind that this happened only after Biden imploded in historic fashion on the debate stage, or that his party’s elders then had to spend three weeks dragging him offstage against his will as his standing in the polls sagged. “We left at a time when we had a good candidate.
She was fully funded.” Credit: BBC Radio 4 Today Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement “Fully funded” is not very high praise for your hand-picked vice-president’s attributes as a candidate. It’s the one thing that the party apparatus can do for literally anybody it nominates. “Um, and what happened was” – This is the point in the answer where a normal person would say one of three things: blame Harris and her campaign for blowing it, take some responsibility for leaving her a mess to clean up, or argue that events beyond either of their control took over.
Biden chose none of the above. He just dropped the subject of Harris without even saying her name, abandoned any effort to explain what happened in the election, and lurched into a ramble about how it was hard to quit because he was just so successful: Joe Biden can’t even bring himself to say Kamala Harris’s name – Kevin Lamarque/REUTERS “What we had set out to do, no one thought we could do and become so successful in our agenda it was hard to say, ‘Now I’m gonna stop now.’… Things moved so quickly that it made it difficult to walk away.” Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement If Biden thinks the story of his presidency is that he was just too successful to quit, he’s deluded. If he can’t reflect at all on any of his failures, who does that leave to blame?
He clearly knows that he can’t point the finger openly at Harris without accusing himself of bad judgment for hiring her. But for a guy who had pledged to be a transitional figure, his stubborn insistence on clinging to the top of the ticket sent a loud enough message at the time that he didn’t trust Harris with his legacy. Now, his insistence that things were just fine when she took over, coupled with his refusal to say anything more substantial in her favour than “she was fully funded,” speaks volumes in what is unsaid.
When the Bidens have appeared in public with Harris, as they did at Jimmy Carter’s funeral, commentators have noted the apparent venom between Jill Biden and Harris. For Joe, it seems easier to retreat into an imaginary world where he was undone by the magnitude of his own success. But even Joe Biden’s fantasies aren’t extravagant enough to pretend that Kamala Harris did a good job running for president.
Dan McLaughlin is a senior writer at National Review. Broaden your horizons with award-winning British journalism. Try The Telegraph free for 1 month with unlimited access to our award-winning website, exclusive app, money-saving offers and more.
