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.

  • @mctoasterson@reddthat.com
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    214 months ago

    For an ancient venal egotist like Joe, the fact that Kamala lost is close to a best case scenario. He would’ve gotten completely waxed if he had stayed in… but now he gets to say he was forced aside by the party leaders (Pelosi, the Obamas etc.) and that is completely verifiably true, but he also gets to claim he totally would’ve won, which is very likely not true, but now we will never know.

  • @RememberTheApollo_@lemmy.world
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    214 months ago

    Sour grapes. There are no guarantees he would have won, and the propaganda machine would have played almost exactly the same tune it did for Harris. Eggs, israel, gas prices, too old…

    People stayed home. That’s why we got trump.

    • @Dkarma@lemmy.world
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      204 months ago

      Not sour grapes.

      Pure fucking delusion and narcissism.

      We all watched the debate. There was no coming back from that.

  • Steal Wool
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    74 months ago

    I guess when you’re president t of the US you get access to the really cood crack

  • @leadore@lemmy.world
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    4 months ago

    Hell, he might be right (I doubt it but you never know). BUT better than either of those options would have been if he’d announced by 2023 that he would not be running for reelection (like he campaigned on!) so the Dems could have had a full field and competitive primaries. That would have given them the best chance to win (but would they have? kinda doubt that too).

    I DO agree with his understatement that his Garland decision was a mistake. Not just a mistake, a disaster!

    • @ghen@sh.itjust.works
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      44 months ago

      He could have stepped down in 2022, given Kamala his last two years, and she would still be eligible for two more terms after that. She would have had incumbency, experience, and a younger face than the oldest guy who ever ran for president.

  • @tal@lemmy.today
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    4 months ago

    You can go back and look at Pew polling or Gallup polling. The top concern for people who voted Trump was the economy. Within that, the aspect that they were most concerned about was prices. That is, people were very unhappy about inflation. There was a lot of inflation relative to normal US levels under Biden.

    The Trump administration also adopted inflationary policy. And doing so was generally considered desirable by economists; having inflation is preferable to recession in terms of the impact on a country, and COVID-19 was going to produce some level of economic disruption. But that doesn’t change the fact that the public doesn’t view inflation in that way; it’s very unpopular with the public, and past polling has shown that the public, in the US and elsewhere, is more upset about having inflation than a recession.

    https://www.nber.org/system/files/chapters/c8881/c8881.pdf

    The results show that most people in all countries would choose low inflation even if it meant that millions more people would be unemployed.

    In general, the American public also attributes short-term aspects of the economy directly to the President.

    The Trump campaign also worked to drive those concerns and associate them with the Biden administration.

    Benefitting from mis-attribution of economic behavior and policy is not unique to the Republicans. Clinton benefited from it; the “it’s the economy, stupid” slogan played off public concern about economic policy where there probably wasn’t much to blame Bush for, but the public was still upset about it. To some extent, it winds up being luck of the draw; if the economy is growing when you’re President, people tend to credit you for it, whether you really deserve credit or not, and if it’s contracting, people tend to blame you for it, again whether you really deserve blame or not. They don’t go digging through data or reading much about where policy originated.

    That’s been a property of American elections for some time.

    If you want to change that, you have a hard communications problem.

    My guess is that neither Biden nor Harris was going to solve that communication problem, fundamentally change that aspect of electoral politics, and I think that unless they managed to pull some very large rabbit out of the hat, that was going to dominate the election.

    • @Eldritch@lemmy.world
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      54 months ago

      No Democrat will in our lifetime. It’s to late for that. The wealthy own all major social media outlets, all major traditional media outlets, and are turning them to disinformation and AI slop. Even as they spin up thousands of AI slop and misinformation farms masquerading as small independent outlets to keep the fools that stray corralled.

      Liberal or economic liberal politics will never solve it either. As this is a feature of them. It’s working as intended, in the interests of the worst possible people.

    • @finitebanjo@lemmy.world
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      24 months ago

      Technically, Inflation peaked in Biden’s first year. That means it rose under Trump and declined under Biden. I’m sure people really did think what you said, but I think it needs to be clarified that the economy actually did improve, from how it was in the Covid 2020 Era, after Biden took office.

    • @PhilipTheBucket@ponder.cat
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      154 months ago

      To me, there are a couple problems of perception that gave Biden/Harris a huge uphill battle in the election that they didn’t need to have.

      Biden actually did a ton to address problems of inequality and income in America. He worked harder on it than any president since Johnson at least, and scored some huge successes driving up low-income wages and strengthening unions. But, he didn’t do it in ways that were visible to the average American, I think because he’s so far removed from the present-day average American that he genuinely didn’t realize how invisible a lot of his reforms would turn out to be.

      His two huge mistakes were:

      • Talking about, and letting people in his adminstration talk about, inflation, in terms of “how much have prices gone up this year?” He bragged about getting inflation back down, which speaking from an economist’s point of view is accurate. But things are still expensive. To the average American, “getting inflation back down” would have meant that eggs go back down to costing what they used to cost. He could have gotten away with half as much gains on wages, but taking strong action to bring down grocery prices and rent prices. People respond to how much stuff costs, even if they’re making 20% more than they used to a year before.
      • Focusing all his wage efforts on people who are in the “W-2 economy,” even at a low level. The biggest economic victims in the country are undocumented people, people driving Uber, people working at Wal-mart being kept just barely under full-time employment, all of whose rent goes up every year to match anything they’re gaining. People are being squeezed out of the full-time-job-having economy steadily more and more every year and into the desperation economy. I know he did the Climate Corps, but something more like the CCC or WPA, giving real full-time working jobs that can pay a decent income on a massive scale, would have been better than looking out for people who already have a W-2 union job having their union more effectively able to fight for them.

      And then, also, letting Merrick Garland twiddle his thumbs for four years like the cowardly lump that he is. I think history will look back on this past few years of slow-walking the Trump prosecutions as a massive error that led to untold misery and bloodshed. Honestly, even if he fucked up everything else and lost the 2024 election, if he had simply taken the fire on the roof as an urgent problem that needs all hands on deck, instead of one more renovation project that needs to wait its turn until it comes up in the agenda, it would have been better.

      • @ArbitraryValue@sh.itjust.works
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        4 months ago

        Focusing all his wage efforts on people who are in the “W-2 economy,” even at a low level.

        Do people not in the W-2 economy turn out to vote? (Undocumented people clearly don’t.) This isn’t a rhetorical question.

        Edit: a quick search found this from 2016, but it would need to adjusted by the number of people in each segment. (And “W-2 economy” isn’t synonymous with income, but they are correlated.)

        • @PhilipTheBucket@ponder.cat
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          44 months ago

          If people not in the W-2 economy had gotten jobs working in the modern-day WPA, paying $75k a year, they sure as fuck would have started turning out to vote. Probably forever, as long as it kept going. There’s a reason FDR won 4 terms.

      • ℍ𝕂-𝟞𝟝
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        4 months ago

        Garland is easily this day and age’s Chamberlain. Except Chamberlain sacrificed the Sudetenland to buy time for rearmament, what’s Garland’s excuse?

        • @PhilipTheBucket@ponder.cat
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          44 months ago

          Yeah. Chamberlain came in with effectively no military at all, saw that a war with Germany would be like a child trying to fight an adult, oversaw a lot of rearmament, and then declared war on Germany when the situation became more clear, at a point when they still barely had a functional military. He gets a lot of heat for appeasement but the situation he came into was totally hopeless, and he was taking concrete steps to get things moved in the right direction.

          Biden and Garland did fuck-all for 4 years, and then when the situation started showing signs of genuine threat, started talking about pardons for them and their friends as the solution.

  • irotsoma
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    4 months ago

    No, all the problems left of fascists have with Kamala were even moreso with him. The only way Democrats could have won was to hold a fair primary which they haven’t done in a long time. They needed to get people voting for a candidate and not against the other guy which has been the strategy of both parties for ages, but doesn’t work well when one side has people voting for him and your side actually wanted to vote against you, but were never given an alternate.

      • @Cataphract@lemmy.ml
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        104 months ago

        I’m having problems rationalizing what you’re trying to get to. You admit “the DNC stacked the deck” but you don’t think that effected his outcome? You ran on the campaigns but have completely forgotten about the Nevada scandals involving unions and the caucus or what happened in SC when the DNC pressured high profile representatives to back Biden instead of Bernie (of which historically Biden has been horrible for minority communities). These are just off the top of my head, articles and references if you need them and I’ll make sure to find you some more to help with the analysis.

        Seems like you’re splitting hairs trying to form some type of narrative. Democratic primaries have nothing to do with the two-party system? You’d have to completely wretch out decades of political knowledge from my head to even consider that nothing is connected. If there’s a real, viable point you’re trying to make besides “nuh uh”, would love to be exposed to it.

          • @Cataphract@lemmy.ml
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            14 months ago

            This is all sounding a little delusional and honestly blind. Several factors have been pointed out to you, you’re aware of some of it and supposedly followed along. The very statement of “they have a favorite and message in their favor” is a direct conflict to having a “fair primary”.

      • irotsoma
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        204 months ago

        Bernie is one example of not running a fair primary, but not specifically what I was referencing. I was referencing the 2024 Democratic Primary specifically, and then mentioning that very few in the past have been fair to candidates. Not just because of the way the party treats the candidates publicly, but because of the way funding works and the direct control the leaders of the party have over that funding and how blackballing works if any candidate doesn’t follow the party line. Which would be fine if there were allowed to be more than two viable, active parties at once. But the electoral college, among other things, makes that almost impossible, thus why Bernie had to run as a Democrat in the first place when he doesn’t usually belong to the party.

          • irotsoma
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            104 months ago

            You’re quoting the last half of a sentence. “The only way Democrats could have won was to hold a fair primary which they haven’t done in a long time.” A prepositional phrase is an addition/side comment to a current statement. Thus, the 2024 primary was the primary focus of my comment.

            But, again, to address the prepositional phrase portion, yes, none of the primaries in my lifetime have been truly fair.

            As for the two party system, the original comment is referencing the electoral college which is the primary cause of the two party system as I mentioned in the original comment. The reason it’s relevant here is the same reason duopolies are unfair in economic contexts. When hundreds of millions of people have only 2 choices, those 2 rarely will care to appease the majority because they don’t have to in order to keep the customers/constituents. They just have to be the less hated for more people than the other one.

            So, funding. Where does most presidential funding come from if they don’t have direct wealthy donors? The SuperPACs are controlled by the same group of people who lead the DNC. And most primary elections are determined by funding because it’s so expensive just to get your name out there, your message heard, and to get on the ballots. So funding is very relevant to the fairness of the primaries.

              • irotsoma
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                74 months ago

                I don’t know why you’re so focused on Bernie when I only side discussed decades of primaries, but OK if that’s the only primary that matters in all of history, then let’s discuss it.

                Clinton took a bunch of money she promised to give a significant amount of to state and local Democratic parties and then a bunch of what she didn’t take went to the DNC instead and less than half a percent of the $80+ million went to the state and local candidates. And this was fine with the fund raising agreement technically because the DNC wrote it that way, but definitely unethical considering the donations were made with the assumption that it would help the Democratic candidates up and down the ballot, not just Hillary and the DNC. Bernie didn’t take part because of the mismanagement of the DNC and the agreement language that allowed for such things.

                Additionally, Warren, Biden, and several other candidates were prevented from running through pressure from the DNC leadership. If they had been allowed to run, it was said, it would have split the vote too much away from Hillary. Again, it’s easier to control the narratives with a two sided competition so they could get who they wanted.

                These are just two examples of problems with the way the primary was conducted. Unfortunately, because a lot of the financials and other business of political parties is considered proprietary, much more like a corporation than something representing the people who it purports to represent, there is less evidence of a lot of the other issues. Fortunately, Hillary’s campaign was more forthcoming with financial data than the DNC, so we do have some data at least.

                I’m not a Hillary hater and while I think she did some things wrong, and while I admit I’m biased against her from her taking a bunch of money to drop the healthcare reform during her husband’s term that could have saved a lot of lives and perhaps a certain CEO assassin’s severe pain, it’s the responsibility of the party to make the primary elections fair, not the candidates, beyond basic ethical standards at least.

  • @finitebanjo@lemmy.world
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    104 months ago

    The statistics and composite polls predicted the Trump victory, and they predicted it even before Biden dropped out by a larger margin, so he is incorrect.

    But, given how people chose Trump over Kamala, I can’t blame him for thinking that way. Clearly the USA does have reservations about electing a women and a minority.

    • @Maggoty@lemmy.world
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      94 months ago

      Oh no he doesn’t get to say anything about it. He shit the bed, and his team shit the bed. Then when they were staring at polls showing Trump would take 400 electoral college votes they doubled down. They didn’t start a hand off in the background like everyone assumed. No they wasted nearly a month and then called up Kamala Harris one day and told her she was the candidate now, with no warning.

      If anyone is responsible for Trump winning it is Biden and his team. They hid how bad Biden was aging instead of getting a ton of grown-up points by having him retire or get removed by the 25th amendment. That would have given Kamala Harris a year or two of time in office to get the incumbent advantage and set up a real campaign. No they played this like little boys who don’t want to come home because then the party ends.

      • @Zaktor@sopuli.xyz
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        24 months ago

        It’s weird to say, but Harris was like the third most responsible person for her loss. She still is responsible, but Biden and Garland set her up for failure.

    • pachrist
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      344 months ago

      Hey, hey. Rude of you to call the guy who was supposed to save us from another 4 years of Trump but then delivered it anyways a failure. All he did was tread water for 4 years and then hang on to power way too long, simultaneously tanking his own campaign, and making it much more difficult for someone to follow him.

      • Eugene V. Debs' Ghost
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        14 months ago

        Rude of you to call the guy who was supposed to save us from another 4 years of Trump but then delivered it anyways a failure.

        Biden literally kept a lot of Trump’s policies in place, kept his tax cuts in place, and did things Trump was considering despite public outcry, like limiting COVID protections and telling the CDC to stop covering it.

  • Eugene V. Debs' Ghost
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    154 months ago

    Biden: “I’m a one term president, stability in crisis.”

    Biden: “I don’t care, fuck it, you only live once, I’m running again!”

    People: “You said you were a one term canidate, you’re old, you didn’t do COVID well, you broke up strikes, you aren’t protecting women’s rights, trans people are under attack, Mexicans are still in cages at the border, Ukraine could use more help, you’re doing a bad job at stopping weapons to Israel, rent is gone up, inflation is stopped bu not down, groceries are still expensive…”

    Biden: “Shut up Jack, check this out!”

    [“Primaries” give him the win, flops at debate, hands things to Harris]

    Biden: “Well I did what I could do. …I would have won anyways, why be consistant with what I say and do? Now lemme pardon my son after I said I wouldn’t.”

    • @Yewb@lemmy.world
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      54 months ago

      Of all things the pardon of his son is reasonable that guy had a whole culture of assholes trying to find anything to get him in jail just to hurt Biden.

      Then we find out the basis of the entire hunter controversy was a lie and the guy admitted it was a lie after the election.

      So they ended up getting for like tax evasion I would be willing to bet 90% of congress would be guilty of similar things if brought under the same scrutiny.

  • @hark@lemmy.world
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    454 months ago

    This ghoul was propped up in 2020 with the full force of the party and then won thanks to covid, but he thinks he’s some hero. Democrats lost in 2024 in large part thanks to him. Fuck you biden, you racist, genocidal, and power-hungry piece of shit.

    • TonyOstrich
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      174 months ago

      Things would have likely gone a lot better if the Ds would have had an actual primary. It’s so frustrating.

      • Eugene V. Debs' Ghost
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        24 months ago

        Actual primaries are against what the DNC wants. 2016, 2020, and 2024 all had sham ones and argued in court “We don’t have to have fair ones, it’s mainly for show. We’re a private organization, we don’t need to abide by fair election practices.”