Joe Biden regrets having pulled out of this year’s presidential race and believes he would have defeated Donald Trump in last month’s election – despite negative poll indications, White House sources have said.
The US president has reportedly also said he made a mistake in choosing Merrick Garland as attorney general – reflecting that Garland, a former US appeals court judge, was slow to prosecute Donald Trump for his role in the 6 January 2021 insurrection while presiding over a justice department that aggressively prosecuted Biden’s son Hunter.
With just more than three weeks of his single-term presidency remaining, Biden’s reported rueful reflections are revealed in a Washington Post profile that contains the clearest signs yet that he thinks he erred in withdrawing his candidacy in July after a woeful debate performance against his rival for the White House, Trump, the previous month.
The president stepped aside – to be replaced as his party’s nominee by the US vice-president, Kamala Harris – after mounting pressure from fellow Democrats, who cited polling evidence that appeared to show him heading for a near-certain election drubbing from Trump, who was seeking a historic return to the White House as the Republicans’ nominee.
Harris’s ascent to the top of the ticket led to a surge of enthusiasm and improved poll numbers but ultimately ended in a decisive electoral college and popular vote defeat.
While Biden and his aides have been careful not to blame Harris, they apparently believe the result would have been different if he had stood his ground, according to the Washington Post’s reporting.
It is a view disputed by many Harris supporters, who blame the president for waiting too long before withdrawing, thus leaving the vice-president with little time to mount an effective campaign.
They also point out that Biden’s determination to seek a second term violated his 2020 campaign vow to be a “transitional” figure, who would pass the torch after one term after steering the country away from Trump’s presidency.
“Biden ran on the promise that he was going to be a transitional president, and in effect, have one term before handing it off to another generation,” Richard Blumenthal, a Democratic senator for Connecticut told the Post.
“I think his running again broke that concept – the conceptual underpinning of the theory that he would end the Trump appeal, he would defeat Trumpism and enable a new era.”
The outgoing president’s misgivings over Garland are poignant given that he announced him as his attorney general nominee the day after a Trump-incited mob attacked the US Capitol on 6 January 2021 in an effort that ultimately failed to overturn Biden’s 2020 presidential election victory.
At the time, Biden said Garland would restore “the honor, the integrity, the independence” of the justice department after years of perceived politicisation under Trump.
“Your loyalty is not to me. It’s to the law, to the constitution, to the people of this nation,” Biden told Garland at his official unveiling.
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But according to the Post, Biden had to be persuaded by his chief of staff, Ron Klain, to choose Garland – at the time best known as Barack Obama’s failed choice to succeed the conservative justice Antonin Scalia on the US supreme court before his nomination was derailed by a Republican-led Senate.
Biden’s political allies had pressed the case for Doug Jones, then a Democratic senator for Alabama, arguing that he would be better equipped to navigate Washington’s bitterly partisan atmosphere. Klain, instead, argued that Garland, reputed for fairness, would send a more reassuring message of justice department independence after Trump.
As events transpired, Biden still faced false accusations by Trump of “weaponising” the department as it pursued criminal investigations over his January 6 role and for hoarding classified White House documents – even while also investigating Hunter Biden and the president himself, the latter for also illegally retaining classified documents.
Biden now believes he should have chosen someone else, the Post reported, a view consistent with many Democrats, who believe Garland was too slow to investigate and eventually prosecute Trump for January 6 and related activities to reverse his defeat.
The deliberate pace of the investigation, which eventually resulted in the appointment of a special counsel, Jack Smith, meant Trump was ultimately able to avoid the spectacle of a politically damaging trial before this year’s election.
Smith last month formally applied for his two criminal cases against Trump to be wound up in view of his election victory, in effect ending them.
