Biden says he withdrew from running due to pressure from his party – 08/11/2024 – Al-Alam

US President Joe Biden said on Sunday (11) that he had given up running for re-election because he did not want public opinion to focus on him and his mistakes that were hindering the nomination of his supporters in the Democratic Party.

“My various Democratic colleagues, in the House and Senate, thought I was going to hurt them in their campaigns,” Biden said. To CBSIn his first interview since leaving the campaign. “If I stayed in the race, that would be the issue. I thought it would be a huge distraction.”

He also said that polls showed that the race against former President Donald Trump would be very close, and that the most important thing for him in that scenario was to defeat his Republican rival.

“The most important thing to me, and I’m not kidding, is preserving our democracy,” he said. “While it’s a great honor to be president, I think I have an obligation to the country to do the most important thing: We need, we need, we need to defeat Trump.”

Biden dropped out of the race on July 21. When he announced his withdrawal from the race, he named his running mate, Kamala Harris, as his successor. Harris has already gathered enough support to secure the nomination at the party’s convention on August 19.

Doubts about the president’s cognitive ability to face an election race, and ultimately a new term at the age of 81, have surrounded his campaign since he announced his intention to run for re-election.

But his disastrous performance in the first debate against Trump, at the end of last July, took these questions to a new level.

In the interview broadcast on Sunday (11), Biden attributed his performance to the fact that he was sick at the time.

Elsewhere, he said he was still not confident there would be a peaceful transition between presidents if Trump lost.

He pointed to a statement by the former president in which he said that if he was not elected, the entire country would see a “bloodbath” – a comment the Republican campaign said he made in an economic context.

“You can’t love your country when you’re winning,” Biden declared.