During a Thursday appearance on The View, Former President Joe Biden defended himself against critics who insisted he dropped out of the 2024 presidential race too late, hurting then-Vice President Kamala Harris’s chances of defeating Donald Trump. Unfortunately, he got the timing all wrong.
Following a disastrous debate performance against Trump in June, Biden took some time for crisis control and tried to right the ship. After a reported pressure campaign from Democratic leadership, Biden announced he was stepping down as nominee on July 21, 2024, just three months and a week before Election Day.
The decision came so late in the process that the Democratic Party was left with few options other than to nominate Vice President Harris, giving her just roughly 100 days to set her own campaign apart from Biden’s.
“Well, Mr. President, some have even argued that leaving the race and endorsing your vice president, Vice President Harris, a hundred, over a hundred days before the election hampered her campaign,” Sonny Hostin noted. “What do you say to those critics?”
“I say, number one, that there were still six full months,” Biden errantly replied, nearly doubling the amount of time he actually provided his former running mate before pivoting.
“She [Harris] was in every aspect, every decision I made, every decision we made. And I don’t think, I hope I didn’t sound the wrong way. I don’t think anybody thought we’d be successful as we were,” he said. “I don’t think anybody thought we’d pass the Recovery Act. I don’t think anyone thought we’d have. We deal with chips and science. I don’t think anybody thinks we’d have all we got done in a close race.”
“Think about it,” he continued. “We got more major legislation passed to fundamentally change the direction of the country than any president has in a long, long time. And so we’re in a situation where we came to office, and we agreed on two things. One, I was sick and tired of trickle-down economics. And my dad used to say, not a whole lot trickle down in his kitchen table.”
“And so we built the economy from the middle out and the bottom up. The strongest economy in the world, where we left,” he concluded. “That’s not hyperbole, that’s a fact.”
Ironically, one of the biggest issues that led to Trump’s election was the rising cost of living under the Biden administration, which Trump effectively exploited to get back into the White House.
Watch above via ABC.
