WESTON, Mass. — President Biden on Tuesday said if former President Trump wasn’t running for another term in 2024, he’s “not sure” if he would have embarked on his own reelection campaign.
“If Trump wasn’t running, I’m not sure I’d be running. But we cannot let him win,” Biden said at a campaign reception in Weston, Mass.
Biden made the comment after laying out in stark terms the threat he believes Trump poses to democracy, citing Trump’s remarks in which he compared his political enemies to vermin, recent reports that he’d use the Insurrection Act to implement policy changes, and a December 2022 social media post in which Trump suggested he would terminate parts of the Constitution.
Biden was speaking to a group of big donors Tuesday while on a fundraising swing in the Boston area. Trump is set to participate in a prerecorded town hall later Tuesday with Fox News’s Sean Hannity.
Biden later was asked to clarify his remarks when asked by reporters if he would still run for president if Trump was not running.
“I expect so but look, he is running and I have to run,” the president said.
When asked if he would drop out if Trump dropped out, Biden responded: “No, not now.”
Trump announced his candidacy for president in November 2022, following the midterm elections. Biden announced he would run for reelection in April of this year, following months of speculation over whether he should run again, largely due to his age.
Biden, 81, has trailed Trump in some recent polls, most notably in several key swing states he needs to win in order to secure the general election. But Biden aides have repeatedly dismissed the fixation on polling, arguing it was not predictive of Biden’s success in 2020 and that it’s too soon to be predictive of his fate a year from now.
Meanwhile, in recent days, The Washington Post, The Atlantic and The New York Times each published stories referencing what they dubbed a “Trump dictatorship,” making the case that a second Trump presidency posed a threat to democracy. Trump allies have pushed back on the blaring warnings.
Updated at 10:41 p.m. ET