President Joe Biden never explicitly said he would serve only one term in the White House.
At times in the 2020 campaign, Biden suggested he didn’t want two terms, saying he envisioned himself as “as a bridge, not as anything else.”
As the furor over his poor debate performance last month has mushroomed into growing calls from Democrats for him to quit the race, Biden acknowledged in an interview with BET this week that he intended to be a transition candidate, but the threat of Donald Trump compelled him to run again.
And in his 2017 memoir, “Promise Me, Dad,” Biden suggested he didn’t expect his working life to go beyond 2025, much less his political career.
Biden recounted then-president Barack Obama asking him over lunch at the White House, in January 2015, “How do you want to spend the rest of your life?”
Biden was 73 at the time, and in his answer to Obama he gave himself only one more decade to make his mark. He felt he couldn’t confide in the president his true desire to run, so instead he laid out two options.
“I could have a good ten years with my family, laying the foundation of financial security for them and spending more time with them. Or I could have ten years trying to help change the country and the world for the better,” Biden wrote.
“If the second is within reach,” he recalled telling Obama, “I think that’s how I should spend the rest of my life.”
Obviously, Biden’s plans changed ― in his conversation with Obama he envisioned retiring in 2025 after serving two terms in the White House, not just one. But it’s a striking comment in the context of his current push, as already the oldest president in U.S. history, for a second term that would end when he’s 86.
A decade ago, as now, many in the Democratic establishment wanted Biden to step aside so someone else could take on the Republicans, with Obama and others arguing Hillary Clinton was a better candidate. Biden today is reportedly furious about Obama’s behind-the-scenes efforts to nudge him off the campaign trail.
In his book, Biden mocked the “sage political analysts” who thought Clinton would inevitably make history as the first female president. At the same time, he described his decision not to run in 2016 as entirely based on his own personal struggle. He was still grieving the loss of his son Beau, who died of brain cancer in 2015.
“Giving up on the presidential race would be like saying we were giving up on Beau,” Biden wrote. “The mere possibility of a presidential campaign, which Beau wanted, gave us purpose and hope ― a way to defy the fates.”
The turning point came after Politico reported that Biden himself planted a story that his son’s dying wish was for his father to run for president.
“The idea that I would use my son’s death to political advantage was sickening,” Biden wrote. “If this thing about Beau came up somewhere in my hearing, I was afraid I would not be able to control my rage.”
Biden wrote that his adviser Mike Donilon told him not to run in October 2015 after seeing him clenching his jaw in a campaign meeting: “The pain he read on my face was off the charts.”
Fast forward to 2024: Biden’s fellow Democrats are once again telling him he can’t win. Biden turned in a dismal debate performance against Trump last month that amplified long-simmering voter concerns about his age. But he’s adamant he can be president for another four years and has once again taken to telling political analysts they don’t know what they’re talking about.
“You were wrong about 2020,” he told reporters this month. “You were wrong about 2022 that we were going to get wiped out. Remember the ‘red wave’?”
Contrary to the impression he gave during that debate, his doctor said in a February report that he’s “fit for duty and fully executes all of his responsibilities without exemptions or accommodations.”
And in a statement on Friday in the face of a fresh wave of Democrats calling on him to step aside, Biden, who has been self-isolating with a case of COVID-19, said he’s not backing out.
“I look forward to getting back on the campaign trail next week to continue exposing the threat of Donald Trump’s Project 2025 agenda while making the case for my own record and the vision that I have for America: one where we save our democracy, protect our rights and freedoms, and create opportunity for everyone,” he said.