Former first lady Jill Biden declared Tuesday that former President Joe Biden would have beaten Donald Trump in 2024 if he hadn’t withdrawn from the election. (Watch the video below.)
While Trump’s sweep of major swing states and taking of the popular vote in his blowout victory over eventual Democratic nominee Kamala Harris might say otherwise, Jill Biden made her case on MS NOW’s “Morning Joe.”
“But does he believe to this day that he would’ve defeated Donald Trump in that election?” co-host Willie Geist asked Biden of her husband.
“I believe he would have beat Donald Trump in that election,” she said.
In an appearance to promote her memoir “View From The East Wing,” Biden spoke of her husband’s difficult decision to run again in the first place.
“Joe had to decide whether to run again,” she said. “But, like you said, you know, we did well — the Democrats did well — in the midterms, and in 2023, the Democratic Party was totally behind Joe, and people, everywhere I went, ‘Joe’s got to do it again! He’s got to run! He’s got to run!’”
“And he was like, ‘Well, I don’t know’ – you know – ‘Am I too old?’ I mean, it was the age question, no matter where we went,” she continued.
Biden said that in polling on Democrats who could beat Trump, her husband’s name was the only one that kept emerging.
“And so that’s why Joe decided to continue on,” she said.
“Do you or does the president now regret dropping out of the race?” Geist asked.
“You know, I would never want anyone I loved to go through that again,” she replied. “It was so painful, not just for us, not just for me and for Joe, but we have children and grandchildren. And to see them have to go through that was really a hard thing, a hard time for our family, and I would never want to put our family through that again,” she said.
Elsewhere in the interview, the ex-FLOTUS said she didn’t know whether Biden would have been able to serve a second term anyway, given his cancer diagnosis.
