In what may be the last wide-ranging interview of his presidency, President Biden came as close as he probably ever will to admitting what many recognized long before he dropped out of the 2024 presidential race: He shouldn’t have tried to run for a second term in the White House.
Biden told USA Today he ran in 2020 because he believed he had “the best chance” of defeating Donald Trump. But he added, “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. But I don’t know. Who the hell knows? So far, so good. But who knows what I’m going to be when I’m 86 years old?”
Up until July 21 — less than four months before what was often called the most consequential election of our lifetime — Biden thought he could do the job even as he approached his 82nd birthday.
If not for his disastrous debate performance against Trump in June, which intensified concerns about the mental acuity of the oldest president in American history, Biden would have been the nominee. And the same ego that led Biden to a reelection bid also led him to tell USA Today that he could have defeated Trump again.
But when asked whether he could have served another four years, the president said, “I don’t know.”
Many people close to Biden knew he had neither the physical nor the mental fitness to run for a second term. And even before the inevitable deluge of inside-the-Biden-White House books, details about how aides and associates spent years covering for the aging president have been spilling out for months.
Last month, The Wall Street Journal reported that Biden advisers directed those meeting with the president to keep interactions “short and focused,” and often shielded him from the media and his own Cabinet. Compared with his immediate predecessors, Barack Obama and Trump, who held 19 and 25 full Cabinet meetings during their first terms respectively, Biden reportedly had held only nine as of December.
That’s not to say that Biden didn’t have major accomplishments in his single term. He signed into law the most significant gun safety bill in 30 years and the infrastructure and jobs act. Both bills passed with bipartisan support.
Biden canceled billions in student debt, though the Supreme Court prevented him from eliminating as much as he wanted. In recent weeks, he commuted 37 of 40 federal death sentences to life without parole and moved to ban medical debt from credit reports. He nominated and saw confirmed 235 federal judges to lifetime appointments and diversified the bench more than any president in history — 60 percent are women and 60 percent are people of color.
All of these achievements are considerable. But they will be weighed alongside Biden’s ill-fated decision to run again and then to stay in the race too long.
However history remembers Biden, part of his legacy will be that he failed to keep his word “as a Biden,” something he has long touted as sacrosanct. In 2020, when there were increasing public conversations about this nation’s gerontocracy, many welcomed reports that Biden had quietly informed aides in 2019 that he would not run for a second term. While he made no public promises, that’s what Biden was referring to when he mentioned “passing the baton” in the USA Today interview.
But when the time came, Biden would not let go of that metaphorical baton until it was pried from his hands. If Biden believed he could win, it seemed that few others outside his inner circle were similarly convinced.
Perhaps a vigorous Democratic primary season would have yielded an opponent who could have defeated Trump. In just over 100 days, Vice President Kamala Harris launched a robust campaign. One can only wonder what she might have accomplished with more time, even given this nation’s deep racism and misogyny.
Serving as a transition candidate to younger Democratic leaders would have been a worthwhile coda to Biden’s flawed but long tenure in public service. But after putting his ego ahead of the country, he now seems to recognize — too late — that the dynamic future he envisioned was never something he could deliver.
Renée Graham is a Globe columnist. She can be reached at renee.graham@globe.com.