In a May 8 interview on “The View,” former President Joe Biden defended his mental sharpness, while pointing to sexism, racism, and the inability to provide Americans with short-term relief during the opening stages of the pandemic as reasons that Donald Trump returned to power as the 47th president of the United States.
According to The New York Times, Biden flatly said that the reports of his declining mental faculties were inaccurate. “They are wrong,” Biden said. “There’s nothing to sustain that.”
He added, “The only reason I got out of the race is because I didn’t want to have a divided Democratic Party.”
Biden also said during the interview that he “wasn’t surprised” that his vice president, Kamala Harris, lost the election or that she was subjected to criticism that he felt was more based on her identity than her politics.
“They (the Trump campaign and the Republican Party) went the route of the sexist route. I’ve never seen quite as successful and a consistent campaign undercutting the notion that a woman couldn’t lead the country, and a woman of mixed race,” Biden said.
While he didn’t directly address the speculation that Harris is potentially eyeing a run for the governor of California, he did offer kind of a tepid endorsement of Harris’ prospects were she to decide to run for the presidency in 2028.
“She’s got a difficult decision to make about what she’s going to do. I hope she stays fully engaged. I think she’s first-rate, but we have a lot of really good candidates as well. So, I’m optimistic. I’m not pessimistic,” Biden said regarding the former vice president.
He also indicated that a “pandemic hangover” changed the relationship of everyday Americans with the federal government, in ways that are still being defined, and acknowledged that his administration did not do well enough at delivering immediate results or communicating what the administration had delivered on.
“I think we underestimate the phenomenal negative impact that covid had and the pandemic had on people, on attitudes, on optimism, on a whole range of things. Well, we made a lot of commitments and we — you know, billion-dollar tunnels going through for Amtrak, bridges, so on, but we weren’t quite as good as he was about advertising it,” Biden said, a reference to Donald Trump’s constant sales pitches, regardless of whether or not his deliverables are beneficial to all of the country’s residents.
He concluded, “It doesn’t say, ‘Biden brought you this.’ There’s nothing saying, ‘The Democrats brought you this.’ And we knew none of this would occur for another six months to two years. It takes time to do all that.”
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