Joe Biden insists he would have beaten Donald Trump in TV interview with The View

Former US president Joe Biden has popped up on American television to make a claim some might call delusional.

Former US president Joe Biden is still insisting he would have beaten Donald Trump in last year’s election if his party had not forced him out of the race.

Mr Biden made that clear during an appearance on The View today alongside his wife, the former first lady Jill Biden.

One of the show’s hosts Alyssa Farah Griffin, who worked in the White House during Mr Trump’s first term, but has since become a fierce critic of the President, asked the obvious question.

“You previously said you thought that you would have won,” Ms Griffin noted, alluding to media reports about Mr Biden’s views behind the scenes.

“Since then, Donald Trump won all the battleground states, and made inroads to every demographic. Working class voters, hispanic men, black men. Knowing what you know now, do you think you would have beaten him?”

Mr Biden.

Ms Griffin.

“Yeah,” Mr Biden answered.

“He still got seven million fewer votes. A lot of people didn’t show up, number one. Number two, they were very close in those toss-up states. It was – it wasn’t a slam dunk.”

Mr Trump actually received three million more votes in 2024 than he did in 2020, and won the popular vote for the first time in his three elections, albeit by a historically small margin.

Mr Biden may have been referring to the 2020 election, in which he earned 81 million votes compared to Mr Trump’s 74 million, but if so it was quite the non-sequitur.

“You guys don’t focus as much, and I think it’s good, on polling numbers. But let me put it this way. He’s had the worst hundred days any president has ever had,” Mr Biden added.

Senior Democrats pressured Mr Biden to end his re-election bid in the middle of last year after a catastrophic performance during his first televised debate against Mr Trump, which reinforced voters’ existing concerns about his age and mental acuity.

He had not led Mr Trump in the national polling averages, at that point, since mid-2023, and his approval rating was stuck underwater. Mr Biden’s feeble offering in the debate, which led to those numbers cratering further, convinced his own party that he couldn’t win.

The Trump vs Biden polling average, as compiled by RealClearPolitics.

Upon his withdrawal, then-vice president Kamala Harris became the Democratic Party’s nominee, with mere months left before the election. She ultimately lost every swing state to Mr Trump.

Sarah Haines, another of The View’s hosts, asked whether Mr Biden was surprised by Ms Harris’s defeat. He blamed it, in large part, on sexism and racism.

“I wasn’t surprised,” Mr Biden said.

“Not because I didn’t think she was qualified. She is. I was surprised because it went the sexist route. This is a woman, she is this, she did – I’ve never seen quite a successful and consistent campaign undercutting the notion that a woman couldn’t run the country, and a woman of mixed race.”

Another host, Sunny Hostin, asked whether Mr Biden had hamstrung his vice president’s campaign by waiting so long to drop out of the race.

“What do you say to your critics?” she asked.

Kamala Harris took over as the Democratic nominee with about a hundred days left in the campaign. Picture: Camille Cohen/AFP

“I say, number one, that there were still six full months,” Mr Biden claimed, nearly doubling the amount of time that he’d actually left Ms Harris before election day.

“She was in every aspect, every decision I made, every decision we made. And I don’t think, I hope I didn’t sound the wrong way. I don’t think anybody thought we’d be as successful as we were,” he added, pivoting to a justification of his record as president.

“I don’t think anybody thought we’d pass the Recovery Act. I don’t think anyone thought we’d have – we deal with chips and science. I don’t think anybody thinks we’d have all we got done in a close race.

“Think about it. We got more major legislation passed to fundamentally change the direction of the country than any president in a long, long time.

“We built the economy from the middle out and the bottom up. The strongest economy in the world, when we left. That’s not hyperbole, that’s a fact.”

At the risk of editorialising too fulsomely, I should note: Mr Biden has long had a rhetorical tick of claiming nobody thought something was possible when the general consensus was, in fact, that said thing was quite readily achievable.

Jill Biden was only present for part of the interview. She was asked, quite pointedly, whether she and her husband had been in denial about his capacity to serve another term.

Joe and Jill Biden appeared on The View.

“It’s been reported that you created a sort of cocoon around him, and limited his interactions with the media and others,” one host noted.

“Do you think you could have been too close to the situation to objectively gauge whether he could handle another four years?”

“I was with Joe day and night. I saw him more than any other person,” Dr Biden replied.

“I saw him all throughout the day, and I did not create a cocoon around him. I mean, you saw him in the Oval Office, you saw him making speeches. He wasn’t hiding somewhere. I didn’t have him sequestered in some place. That’s ridiculous.”

Dr Biden said some of the commentary around her role, in the White House, was “very hurtful, especially from some of our so-called friends”.

Originally published as Joe Biden insists he would have beaten Donald Trump in TV interview with The View