Donald Trump laughed off a report that Joe Biden still believes he would have won the 2024 presidential election if he hadn’t pulled out of the race after a disastrous debate performance in June.
“Well, he was way behind, he would’ve really, I assume, not had a chance,” Trump said when questioned by reporters at the New Year’s Eve party at his Mar-a-Lago resort.
“I wish him well,” Trump continued of his predecessor. “He had a chance to do it in the debate, and that didn’t work out too well for him. That was, I guess, the reason that really led to his downfall.”
President Joe Biden meets with US President-elect Donald Trump in the Oval Office. / SAUL LOEB / Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images
According to the Washington Post, Biden acknowledged that he “screwed up” at the presidential debate with Trump that effectively wrecked his campaign. He offered soft, stilted responses to questions and struggled to handle his opponent’s brash retorts.
But the Post claims Biden, 82, and some of his aides now believe that he should have stayed the course despite his poor polling numbers.
Many other Democrats still blame the president for holding on too long and not allowing his vice president Kamala Harris enough time to put together a winning campaign.
Speaking at Mar-a-Lago, Trump, 78, predicted in appropriately trumped-up terms that the United States was due for a “great year” in 2025. “I think we’re gonna do fantastically well as a country. We’re gonna bring it back, it has to be brought back. People are not respecting our country very much and they gotta respect us a lot.
“There’s a whole light over the whole world,” he added. “Not just our country, there are a lot of very happy people.”
