Biden Says He Would Have Beaten Trump if He Stayed in the Race

With just weeks left in Joe Biden’s term, the president is reflecting on his decades-long career in elected office, and what he must do before passing the mantle of leadership to President-elect Donald Trump. In a wide-ranging exit interview published by USA Today on Wednesday, Biden discussed everything from weighing preemptive pardons for individuals on Trump’s revenge list, to his continued conviction that he could have defeated Trump at the ballot box. 

“It’s presumptuous to say that, but I think yes,” Biden said when asked if he believes he could have won the November election. The president based his assertion on his review of election polling. He conceded, however, that larger questions remained about his ability to complete another four year term. 

“When Trump was running again for reelection, I really thought I had the best chance of beating him,” Biden said of his decision to run in 2020. “But I also wasn’t looking to be president when I was 85 years old, 86 years old. And so I did talk about passing the baton.”

Could he have handled another four years? “I don’t know,” Biden said. “Who the hell knows?”

It’s dubious, to say the least, that Biden would have defeated Trump. After his disastrous performance in his single debate against Trump, during which the president struggled to form coherent answers to questions and seemed utterly lost in the setting, public confidence in his ability to pull off an electoral victory imploded. Congressional Democrats, including Nancy Pelosi, moved against him, as did Democrats across America. Biden’s contention that polling supported him staying in also strains credulity. The publicly available polling on his chances of beating Trump in an electoral rematch did not bode well, and in November, Jon Favreau, host of the Pod Save America podcast, claimed that internal Biden polling predicted a 400-point Electoral College victory for Trump if the president remained in the race.

Biden also told USA Today that he was considering granting preemptive pardons — a rare, but not unheard of move by outgoing presidents — for figures like Liz Cheney and Dr. Anthony Fauci. Biden explained that in his meetings with Trump, the president-elect did little to dispel the notion that he would move to prosecute his critics. 
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“I tried to make clear that there was no need, and it was counterintuitive for his interest to go back and try to settle scores,” Biden said. “He didn’t say, ‘No, I’m going to…’ You know. He didn’t reinforce it. He just basically listened.”

On his legacy, the president hopes that it’s “one that says I took an economy that was in disarray and set it on track to lead the world, in terms of the new sort of rules of the road.” 

“The hardest thing to do for me in the economy was to think through what were the immediate fixes you could do to make people feel better? But what do we do in the long-term? Put America in a position where you continue to be able to lead the world,” he said. “For example, we passed a $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill. Hooray, hooray. That sounds great, right? Historians will talk about (how) great the impact was, but it didn’t (have) any immediate impact on people’s lives.” 

The president added that in retrospect, he could have been better not necessarily about taking credit for the work done under his administration, but establishing to the public that “that the government did this for you.” 

The specter of Trump looms large over Biden’s exit, and when asked what he feared the most about a second Trump presidency, Biden has plenty. “On the economy, my single greatest fear is that he will try to, and maybe even succeed, in eliminating the elements of the climate law. That he’ll succeed in kicking back the restrictions on drug manufacturers. That he’ll cut programs and infrastructure,” he said. 
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Biden does believe, however, that Trump will have trouble implementing a wholesale rollback of his legislative achievement, particularly those under the Inflation Reduction Act. 

“I think he’s going to have a problem,” he said. “There’s already several very conservative members of his delegation in the United States Senate and House who said, ‘Don’t block the plan in my state. Don’t block A, B, C, or D plan. They’re going to invest $3 billion to build a factory here.’”

“I think if he moves on the tax cuts of $5 trillion, I think if he moves on dealing with increasing tariffs across the board, all they are is increasing cost of consumers in America,” Biden said. “And if he decides to do away with some of the major programs, whether it’s dealing with the rescue plan or infrastructure or the climate law, I think he’s just going to, you know, hurt himself, hurt the economy.”