WASHINGTON ― President Joe Biden, both reflective and defensive as he discussed his legacy, told USA TODAY he believes he could have won his reelection bid − but isn’t sure he would have had the vigor to complete four more years in the Oval Office.
“So far, so good,” he said. “But who knows what I’m going to be when I’m 86 years old?”
In an exit interview about policy, politics and family, the president also said he hasn’t decided whether to take one more momentous action before he leaves office in two weeks: preemptive pardons, something only three presidents have done before.
A fire crackled in the fireplace on a cold Sunday afternoon, a massive portrait of FDR hanging above the mantle. Sitting at the historic Resolute desk, his presidential hero in his line of sight, the 46th president seemed determined to define his own record in office, and he discussed what he might do in his final days.
Biden said he is considering preemptive pardons for public figures such as former Republican congresswoman Liz Cheney and former senior health official Dr. Anthony Fauci who have been threatened with investigation and prosecution by incoming president Donald Trump.
When Biden met with Trump in the Oval Office a week after the November election, he urged the president-elect not to go forward with threats to target those who have criticized him or, in Cheney’s case, helped lead efforts to impeach him.
“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. How did Trump respond? “He didn’t say, ‘No, I’m going to …’ You know. He didn’t reinforce it. He just basically listened.”
Biden said his decision would be based “a little bit” on whom Trump names to top administration roles. The president-elect has chosen former Florida attorney general Pam Bondi as his nominee to head the Justice Department and firebrand loyalist Kash Patel to head the FBI.
It has been more than a half-century since Joseph Robinette Biden, a garrulous 28-year-old lawyer, won his first election by ousting a Republican incumbent for a seat on the New Castle County Council in Delaware. Now, at 82 and after 35 years in the U.S. Senate, eight years as vice president and four as president, he clearly isn’t looking forward to leaving his final elective office.
“It is a pretty historic time, isn’t it?” he said as he greeted a reporter with a grin, hours before a monster snowstorm was set to pound the capital. “I mean, who would’ve − as my brother kids − who would’ve thunk it?”
Read the transcript of USA TODAY’s full interview with President Joe Biden here.
More:Biden has changed course over his 50-year career. None of that compares to his 2024 choice.
Concerns about the age and acuity of America’s oldest president flared with his faltering performance in a televised debate with Trump in June. Democratic leaders who feared Trump would trounce Biden, among them former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, urged him to withdraw from the race, an unprecedented step so late in the campaign.
After he reluctantly pulled out in July, Vice President Kamala Harris became the Democratic nominee, then lost in November.
Could he have won?
“It’s presumptuous to say that, but I think yes,” Biden said, adding he based that view on polling he had reviewed. He expressed no such confidence when asked whether he had the vigor to serve another four years in office, though. “I don’t know,” he replied.
To be sure, many analysts doubt Biden could have won another term from voters who were gloomy about inflation and eager for change. What’s more, his shuffling gait and verbal miscues had raised questions about his fitness for office.
Through an interview that stretched for nearly an hour, Biden was engaged and loquacious, though at times he spoke so softly that it was difficult to hear him. On his desk were index cards that seemed to have talking points and statistics, but he glanced at them only once, at the end, as if to make sure he had mentioned the items most important to him.
More:Full-blown crisis puts Biden on his heels. An inside look at campaign’s pitfalls.
He became most animated, his voice rising, when he described the efforts of his son Hunter to stay sober − speaking of him not as someone whose troubles had embarrassed the president but as a fighter who had made his father proud.
He acknowledged his age was an issue.
“I had no intention of running after Beau died − for real, not a joke,” Biden said, referring to the death of his elder son in 2015 of brain cancer. That family tragedy at what seemed to be the end of his political career was a bookend to the one at its beginning, when his first wife and baby daughter, Naomi, were killed in a car crash.
Then, in 2020, “when Trump was running again for reelection, I really thought I had the best chance of beating him. 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” to the next generation of Democratic leaders, a phrase many in his party took to mean he wasn’t likely to seek a second term.
“But I don’t know,” he said, returning to the question about whether he could have fulfilled the world’s hardest job for another four years. “Who the hell knows?”
His long experience has been an asset in handling foreign affairs, Biden said.
“I think the only advantage of being an old guy is that I’ve known every major world leader for a long time. And so I had a perspective on each of them and their interests,” he said. He had chaired the Senate Foreign Relations Committee even before serving two terms as vice president. “And so I think it helped me navigate some of the fundamental changes taking place, whether it’s in Europe, in Latin America, in the Middle East, in the Far East.”
Biden said he reestablished alliances that Trump had frayed during his first term and managed an “inflection point” in history. As he leaves office, no American troops are deployed in wars abroad, though the United States is deeply involved in the war in Ukraine and the Israel-Hamas conflict in the Gaza Strip.
“The world’s really getting small, man. Really getting smaller and smaller,” he said, with the United States as its crucial leader. That view is at odds with Trump’s call for “America First,” with a national government less concerned about its global role. “What affects what happens in Japan is profoundly affected what happens in Ukraine. What happens in Zambia is going to affect what the hell happens in the Gulf.”
Interviews like this one have been rare in Biden’s tenure. He has held fewer news conferences and individual sessions with reporters than any president since at least Ronald Reagan. USA TODAY is the only print organization scheduled to sit down with him as he leaves office.
That the White House agreed to this interview is a sign that, while Biden is still in a position to command the world’s attention, he wants to make the case that he has forged a robust and positive legacy. The underlying message: The impact of his presidency cannot be fairly judged primarily by controversies over his health, his on-again-off-again presidential bid and his decision to grant a sweeping pardon for his son.
“I hope that history says that I came in and I had a plan how to restore the economy and reestablish America’s leadership in the world,” Biden said. “That was my hope. I mean, you know, who knows? And I hope it records that I did it with honesty and integrity, that I said what was on my mind.”
Signs that his time was short were all around. The press room was almost empty, a member of the small pool of journalists asleep in a chair in the briefing room. White House staffers were giving quiet tours of the West Wing to family and friends while they still could, peeking into the Roosevelt Room and the Cabinet Room.
Later in the afternoon, Biden would go to the East Room to sign the Social Security Fairness Act, expanding benefits for millions of retirees and one of his last pieces of legislation.
On the economy, Biden defended the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan and other legislative programs enacted in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic as crucial to boosting growth and jobs, though the massive spending has been criticized for also fueling inflation. “We spent money doing it. But the fact is that we had a soft landing, no recession,” he said. Most economists had predicted a recession was inevitable.
“How in the hell in a changed world can America lead the world without having the finest infrastructure in the world, without having the best education system in the world, without being in a position where it has the best health care system in the world? I mean, they’re just things that I thought were necessary.”
The higher costs of groceries and rent continue to create kitchen-table problems for millions of Americans, although the rate of inflation has tempered. As Biden prepares to depart, the unemployment rate is near its historic lows, stock markets have surged and the economy is growing.
In public, Trump has decried the state of the nation as “a disaster” and “a mess.” But at their private meeting, Trump praised him, Biden said. “He was very complimentary about some of the economic things I had done. And he talked about − he thought I was leaving with a good record.”
The two men will be forever intertwined in history, Trump’s two terms sandwiching Biden’s one. They have offered Americans starkly different perspectives on the most fundamental issues, including the role of democratic institutions and the importance of political norms.
Eventually, one of them may be seen as a signal of the country’s future course, the other as a political aberration.
Biden warned that Trump risked upending the economic good times if he enacts some of the policies he advocates.
“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 costs of consumers in America. 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.”
Biden’s predecessor-turned-successor has vowed to undo much of his legacy. Biden has tried to make that as difficult as possible, including by spending billions of dollars from the $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill in red states and districts − projects now lauded by some of the Republican members of Congress who represent them.
“It’s the way to lock in a changed economic policy,” Biden said. He hopes.
Regrets? He has a few.
His biggest disappointment, Biden said, was his failure to effectively counter misinformation, including that from Trump. He said that challenge reflects the revolution in how Americans get their news, and whom they trust to tell it.
“Because of the way, nature, the nature of the way information is shared now, there are no editors out there to say ‘That’s simply not true,'” Biden said. He mentioned Trump’s rhetoric about the threat from migrants, though in doing so he apparently conflated two recent attacks by Army veterans involving trucks, one in New Orleans and the other in Las Vegas.
“The guy in Las Vegas is a guy, is a veteran, born and raised in America,” Biden said. “And yet the president comes along, soon to be president again, come along and says: ‘It’s clear. It’s an invasion from the south. All these immigrants are causing all this problem.’ … And I’ll bet you there’s 70% of people out there that read that and believe it. How do you deal with that?”
In Las Vegas, the man behind the explosion of a Tesla Cybertruck outside the Trump hotel was reportedly a Trump supporter, leaving writings calling it a “wake up call” and saying the United States was “terminally ill and headed toward collapse.”
In New Orleans, the man who drove a truck into a crowd in the French Quarter was a Texas-born American who had been radicalized by the Islamic State group, or ISIS.
“When I said that the criminals coming in are far worse than the criminals we have in our country, that statement was constantly refuted by Democrats and the Fake News Media, but it turned out to be true,” Trump had posted on Truth Social after the New Orleans attack.
Biden also expressed frustration about how long it took to get shovels in the ground for the infrastructure projects. “Historians will talk about (how) great the impact was, but it didn’t (have) any immediate impact on people’s lives,” he said. “I think we would’ve been a hell of a lot better off had we been able to go much harder at getting some of these projects in the ground quicker.
“And so I don’t think I’ve been very good at − ” He paused.
Taking credit?
“Or not so much me, but establish that the government did this for you.”
Susan Page is the Washington Bureau chief of USA TODAY. She has covered 12 presidential campaigns and seven White House administrations, and she has interviewed the past 10 presidents (three of them after they left office).
