Biden: I Was Right To Seek Reelection

Joe Biden has a favorite saying that he has attributed to various family members over the years, most often to his mother: Joey, she’d tell him, never bow; never bend; never kneel; never yield. That sentiment runs through his nearly 500-page memoir, as he recounts his four years as president, his decision to run for reelection, and his attempt to stay in the race after the worst presidential-debate performance in American history.

“Today there is no shortage of people who think I blindly raced to run again. Driven by ambition. Selfishness. Unaware of the concerns about my age,” he states, accurately. “I knew better than anyone how old I was. I knew what I was—and wasn’t—capable of doing. I carefully monitored how I was meeting the demands of the job. And there is not a single example of me failing to handle my responsibilities.”

Biden, as you can tell, is neither reflective nor repentant. He does not concede mistakes, and seems to regret almost nothing. He believes he was right to run for a second term, wishes he had been given the chance for a second debate with Donald Trump, and still insists he maintained the support of average voters even as party leadership pressed him to get out of the race. Evidence to the contrary never intrudes on Biden’s recounting of his last acts in politics after a half-century-long career. To make the case that his debate debacle should not have been disqualifying, he notes that Barack Obama had had a “terrible” outing during his first debate in 2012 and had left it to his vice president to “stop the bleeding. Which I did.” The argument may strain credulity, but it is quintessentially Biden.

Several books have covered this ground—including Jill Biden’s View From the East Wing, which was released in June. But Joe Biden’s memoir, Promise Me, America, is the fullest account of his thinking in his own words. One of the most revealing passages comes in the last third of the book, after Biden narrates key episodes of his presidency. With Trump the likely Republican nominee, Biden comes up with a very Trumpian justification for why he needed to run against him, with echoes of Trump’s 2016 vow, “I alone can fix it”: “I believed I was the best person to do it. I was the only person who had ever beaten Donald Trump. And I felt I was the best person to do it again.”

Biden is aware of the second-guessing that arose from that choice. He just doesn’t give it any credence. “I had asked the hard questions of myself. Could I do it? Did I still want to do it? Was there anyone else to do it?” he writes. “I answered that yes, physically I would be able to do the job. And not only did I want to do it, I wanted to do it more than ever.” Yet he also suggests his decision to run was selfless, not selfish. He may have openly coveted the presidency for most of his life, but he insists that a single term would have been satisfactory. “The easiest thing for me to do would have been to say I wouldn’t run again. It would have been far easier for me, and for my family. But I felt an obligation to run. I felt I had set the country on the right path.”

And he had, in fact, defeated Trump in 2020, winning what he termed a “battle for the soul of this nation,” and the first half of the book is a reminder of some of the sweeping legislation that he shepherded through Congress. The decisions he made four years later, though, helped Trump return to political power.

It is no small irony that the book is coming out during a moment of Democratic jubilation, one in which the party seems eager to move beyond what it once was. But now Democrats are being visited by a Ghost of the Party’s Past. The book is a reminder of the painful intramural debates that marked an ultimately failed attempt to hold the presidency. It is also a reminder of how stubborn Biden remains, how the man who always felt burned and resentful of Democrats who overlooked him still has some scores to settle.

Biden knew he was old. His voice had thinned, and he had a tendency of misstating places and names. But his gait, in particular, had become such a visual reminder of his age that it came up when Mitt Romney and his family were over at the White House in May 2022 for a private tour. The senator pulled the president aside for a quiet moment.

“Pump your arms,” Romney told him.

“Excuse me?” Biden responded.

“You’re holding your hands stiffly by your side when you walk. Pump your arms and you’ll look more energetic and confident,” Romney instructed.

Biden thought it was good advice—delivered via the long-lost art of bipartisan decency—and he tried to take it. But it also became an example of Biden’s reluctance to see his age and cognitive decline as a reason he couldn’t run for reelection, as if pumping his arms vigorously enough might cause voters to overlook his aging body and mind. “I believed the experience and the wisdom I had gained over fifty years in public life outweighed the obvious weaknesses of age,” he writes.

[Read: A different kind of fading president]

He points to two moments that convinced him he could run again. The first was his 2023 State of the Union address, which he says received “universal, enthusiastic support from my fellow Democrats.” The second was his unannounced trip to Kyiv two weeks later—a risky foray into a war zone but one that, in Biden’s telling, included packed PB&J sandwiches and, as a longtime Amtrak rider, a fascination with Ukraine’s rail system. He felt that he had addressed concerns that he lacked the vigor to run for reelection.

He recounts his advisers being in agreement before his April 2023 announcement that he was running again, during a “speak now or forever hold your peace” meeting in the Treaty Room. Ron Klain sat on the couch next to him, Jen O’Malley Dillon nearby. Jill Biden urged everyone to give their unvarnished views. Mike Donilon said the polling during his presidency had been remarkably consistent. “There was no demurral or dissent,” Biden reports of the nine people he listed in the room with him. “I was in.”

And he writes of how, as he surveyed his party, he saw talent and ambition on the horizon, but the best Democratic candidate for president, it was clear, remained Joe Biden. “I did not believe any one of them was a stronger candidate than me, or had a better chance of winning in 2024,” he writes, with more than a hint of defensiveness. “You can dismiss that assessment if you want. But I know the process I went through. I made a thoughtful, careful, rigorous judgment.”

He argues that the absence of a strong challenger is proof that the party agreed with his self-assessment. “Anyone who was scared off from running has no business being president.” He cites his strong primary wins, even though he faced little serious opposition. “I had it on good authority that several big names in Democratic politics had looked at running. They held meetings and took polls and talked to donors and to potential staff. If they thought I was weak or vulnerable, they would have taken their shot. But they didn’t,” he writes. “The press and pundits kept talking about how weak I was. But every purportedly serious candidate decided not to run against me because I was too strong.”

Biden spends surprisingly little time dissecting the debate that sent his campaign careening to its inevitable end. Jill Biden, in her own memoir, wrote that she thought her husband was short-circuiting, was having a stroke, or perhaps had been drugged. Strangely, Biden doesn’t address his wife’s speculation, even to dismiss it. He simply says: “I lost my train of thought.” That’s it. This is what Biden believes—or, more to the point, what he wants the world to believe. The problem for Biden is that the debate was actually broadcast nationally and seen by millions of intelligent citizens who may now crave deeper reflection  from him on that consequential moment.

Biden recalls having spent roughly five days preparing for the debate, staying in the presidential cabin at Camp David and doing mock sessions with his advisers. He was feeling sick, but had tested negative for COVID. The debate came after a long stretch of travel and followed the grueling trial and gun-charge convictions of his son, Hunter. “In the end, they failed to break Hunter. But I would be lying if I didn’t admit that they took a piece out of me,” he writes. He arrived at the debate hall shortly before it began, and, he writes, “It didn’t feel right from the start.”

He knew it had gone badly, but many times first debates don’t go as planned for incumbent presidents. He left the stage thinking he would be debating Trump again, and he would improve. “Lots of presidents had bad debates,” he writes. “The difference was that every other president was given the chance to redeem themselves in a second debate. As it turned out, that chance would not be available to me.”

[Watch: The protective ‘politburo’ that hid Biden’s decline]

He attributes his decision to drop out not to factors that he himself was responsible for, but to a remorseless, all-consuming media narrative, and to party leaders who bought into this defeatist narrative: “They would say that whether I stayed in the race was my decision to make. And they would respect whatever decision I made. In reality, the only decision they would respect would be my decision to exit the race.”

Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was one of the ringleaders, Biden says, meeting with him privately at the White House to urge him to reassess. “Publicly she was still saying it was my decision to make. But privately she was working furiously behind the scenes to get elected officials and Biden delegates to defect,” he writes. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer came to his beach house in Delaware, to implore him to do the same. Still, Biden was reluctant. “I wasn’t living in a dream world. Here’s where I was living: I had won the Democratic nomination for president. And I had won it decisively,” he writes. “I believed I was the best person to lead the world.”

He and Schumer argued over the polling, and Biden recounts that he took it personally that old allies were turning on him. “I told Schumer he had a lot of gumption (I may have said it differently at the time), coming to my home and telling me to get out of the race,” he writes. “Loyalty matters to me. If I give you my word, I stick with you. If I say I’m with you, I’m with you to the end.”

He eventually determined that he could remain the nominee, but he would be acting against the wishes of top party leaders and donors. It would divide the party. He asked Donilon, his longtime adviser, to draft a statement. Then Biden slept on it. “Believe it or not, I slept well that night,” he writes. The next day he announced his decision to withdraw, then began calling a long list of allies to thank them. In the book, he lists their names and the precise times he called them. There are union presidents and governors, senators and House members. He called Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez at 3:09 p.m. and Bill Clinton at 3:14 p.m. His 7:06 p.m. call to Gretchen Whitmer, he recalls, went to voicemail. Two names are conspicuously absent from the many calls he reported making: He never reached out to Pelosi, and, notably, he does not list Obama, the man who gave him the biggest break of his professional life, as one of those he called. The president of Steelworkers International? Yes, but not Obama.

He writes that he was firmly against a contested primary to replace him: “Any contested open fight would have been seen as an attempt to block the first Black female vice president from the top of the ticket, and it would have split the party.” Instead, he fully supported his vice president, Kamala Harris, as the nominee. He largely glosses over the 107 days of her campaign, including moments in which she was reluctant to criticize or distance herself from him. “She inherited a united party. And she created an enthusiastic one: Kamala electrified the country,” he writes. “She was a first-rate candidate. She performed masterfully in her debate with President Trump. She was great on the stump. She was a fundraising machine. I was proud of her and the campaign she ran.”

After she lost, Biden invited his predecessor and successor to the Oval Office, but the encounter became somewhat disorienting. Trump was chatty, surprising Biden with a tone so friendly and even fawning that Biden thought Trump might be putting him on. “You know, Joe, if it weren’t for politics, I believe we’d be good friends,” Biden recalls Trump telling him. “If it weren’t for politics, we’d spend all our time golfing together.” Trump, Biden writes, relayed that he was relieved to not have had to run against him. In Biden’s telling, he eventually cut Trump off, confused why he was buttering him up, and began talking about global affairs. The meeting, scheduled for 30 minutes, lasted nearly two hours. (This genial version of Trump also came across four years earlier when Trump left a letter for Biden in the Oval Office in which he channeled history, wished him well, and wrote: “I know you will be true to yourself and the American people.” It was written two weeks after January 6, 2021, and as he continued claiming Biden hadn’t actually won.)

[Joe Biden: What Trump did on January 6 ‘should follow him to his grave’]

The epilogue of the book addresses Biden’s discovery last year that he has an aggressive form of prostate cancer that has metastasized to his bones. He rebuts some speculation that he had kept the diagnosis hidden to downplay concerns about his health or age during his presidency—“For anyone to think I would try to ignore or hide a cancer ravaging my body is absurd”—and says he wishes he had been tested earlier. “As of this writing, I’m feeling good,” he writes. On Sunday night, Biden offered a glimpse into the state of his health, writing on social media that “some days are better than others” and that he won’t be able to do as many events related to the book’s release as he had once planned. “I’m hopeful the words on the page speak for themselves,” he wrote. Biden closes the book with another saying from his family, one that he often cited during his presidency and that he channeled while trying to stay in a race he would ultimately leave. “When I was a kid, whenever something bad would happen, I could count on my dad to say, ‘When you get knocked down, get up,’” he writes. “Until I’m counted out for the last time, I’ll keep getting up. And America will too.”

In an interview with People magazine published this week, he said that if his cancer diagnosis had come while he was in the White House, he would have resigned: “I would’ve not gone forward, because I don’t think an 80-year-old man with cancer should be running.“ Since that wasn’t the case, he believed, “on an objective basis I was the best-equipped person to do the job.” Remarkably, nowhere in the book does he acknowledge—even ruefully, or in passing—what the reader instantly comprehends: If he had run in 2024 and won, he would now be a visibly frail 83-year-old man, fighting a vicious form of cancer while trying to fulfill the endless responsibilities of the American presidency.