Biden says it was his ‘obligation to the country’ to drop out of presidential race

Joe Biden has said it was his “obligation to the country” to drop out of the 2024 presidential election and prevent what he said would be “a genuine danger to American security” if Donald Trump won a second term of office.

The US president gave his reasoning for stepping aside in an at-times emotional interview with CBS News on Sunday, his first since quitting the race in July. He explained that losing the confidence of senior House and Senate Democrats, who feared his unpopularity would hurt them at the polls in November, had weighed on his mind.

Ultimately, Biden said, it was a combination of circumstances that led him to make his momentous decision not to seek re-election, which subsequently saw Vice-President Kamala Harris taking over the Democratic ticket and catching or surpassing Trump in several battleground states, according to new polling data.

“Although I have the great honor to be president, I think I have an obligation to the country to do the most important thing you can do, and that is we must, we must, we must defeat Trump,” he said.

Biden said he did not take the decision lightly, and made it in consultation with his family at home in Delaware. At the time, he said, he still believed he could win in November, but events had “moved quickly” after weeks of pressure and growing unease inside his party that, at 81, he was too old for the rigors of a second term.

Those fears were heightened by his disastrous debate performance against Trump in June. “I had a really bad day in that debate because I was sick. But I have no serious problem,” Biden said, denying he was impaired by any cognitive issue.

“The polls we had showed that it was a neck-and-neck race, it would have been down to the wire. But what happened was a number of my Democratic colleagues in the House and Senate thought that I was gonna hurt them in the races and I was concerned if I stayed in the race that would be the topic.

“I thought it would be a real distraction. [When] I ran the first time I thought of myself being a transition president. I can’t even say how old I am. It’s hard for me to get out of my mouth. Things got moving so quickly. And the combination was … a critical issue for me still … is maintaining this democracy.”

The former House speaker Nancy Pelosi, one of the senior Democrats whose cooling support for Biden was believed to have hastened his decision, gave her own interview on Sunday to MSNBC’s Inside with Jen Psaki.

“I did not think we were on a path to victory,” she said, adding that she “wanted the decision to be a better campaign so that we could win”.

Pelosi praised Biden as a “pre-eminent” president. “He’s right there among the top few, a very consequential president,” she said.

Biden became emotional as he recalled a promise he made to his late son Beau about remaining in politics. “He said, ‘I know when it happens, you’re gonna want to quit. You’re not gonna stay engaged. Look at me. Look at me, Dad. Give me your word as a Biden. When I go, you’ll stay engaged. Give me your word.’ And I did.”

Later in the interview, recorded last week with CBS News chief election and campaign correspondent Robert Costa in the White House treaty room, Biden expressed his fear for the country if former president Trump won in November.

“Mark my words, if he wins watch what happens. He’s a genuine danger to American security,” he said, adding that he was “not confident at all” there would be a peaceful transfer of power if Trump lost.

“We are at an inflection point in world history. We really are. The decisions we make in the next three or four years are going to determine what the next six decades look like, and democracy is the key.

“That’s why I made that speech in Johnson Center about the supreme court. The supreme court is so out of whack, so I propose that we limit terms to 18 years. There’s little regard by the Maga [make America great again] Republicans for the political institutions. That’s what holds this country together. That’s what democracy is about. That’s who we are as a nation.”

The president also had praise for Harris and Tim Walz, the Minnesota governor she named this week as her running mate.

“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,” Biden said of Walz.

“I’ve known him for several decades. I think it’s a hell of a team.”

He said he would be campaigning with Harris in the weeks before the election, and was working with Pennsylvania’s Democratic governor, Josh Shapiro, at one time a frontrunner to be Harris’s vice-presidential pick, on winning the key swing state.

“I’m going to be campaigning in other states as well. I’m going to do whatever Kamala thinks I can do to help most,” he said.

Other topics during the interview included Biden’s belief that a ceasefire and peace deal in Gaza were still possible before he leaves office in January, despite escalating civilian casualties there and in Lebanon.

Asked how he thought his presidency would be remembered, Biden cited leading the country out of the Covid-19 pandemic and economic successes.

“When I announced my candidacy I said we’ve got to do three things, restore the soul of America; build the economy from the middle out and the bottom up, not the top down; and bring the country together. No one thought we could get done, including some of my own people, what we got done,” he said.

“The biggest mistake we made, we didn’t put up signs saying: ‘Joe did it!’”