Joe Biden slipped into the background months before the end of his lone presidential term, so it’s a bit jarring to see him come out fighting on “The View.”
Biden suspended his presidential campaign last year, bowing to pressure from strategists and party officials who believed he had lost a step. Speaking to the hosts of the long-running talk show on Thursday, the former president vehemently denied reports that his cognitive abilities had declined.
“They are wrong,” Biden said. “There is nothing to sustain that.”
Former First Lady Jill Biden backed her husband up, saying that several tell-all books were written by people who were “not in the White House with us.”
“They didn’t see how hard Joe worked every single day,” she said. “I mean, it was nonstop.”
Biden added that his decision to step aside for former Vice President Kamala Harris was not an admission that he couldn’t handle the gig.
“The only reason I got out of the race was because I didn’t want to have a divided Democratic Party. It’s a simple proposition. And so that’s why I got out of the race,” he said. “I thought it was better to put the country ahead of my interest, my personal interest. I’m not being facetious. I’m being deadly earnest about that.”
Elsewhere in the interview, Biden criticized President Donald Trump’s first 100 days in office. He said the president was carelessly destroying the United States’ standing on the global stage.
“I think he has done, quite frankly, a very poor job in the interest of the United States of America,” Biden shared.
Trump has been notably fixated on Biden during the first few months of his second term, attacking the ex-president’s use of an autopen and floating the idea of reversing presidential pardons that Biden granted to his family members. When asked why Trump held such a grudge, Biden offered a pat answer.
“I beat him,” he said.
Watch the entire interview below:
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