Virtually “anybody else” who won the Democratic nomination could have beaten Donald Trump, she said during an interview in New York.
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Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said Tuesday that President Joe Biden made “a terrible mistake” by running for reelection in 2024, adding that virtually “anybody else” the Democrats nominated would have beaten Donald Trump.
Clinton’s comments during an interview in New York with New Yorker editor David Remnick came on the heels of the release last month of the Democratic party’s “autopsy” of Vice President Kamala Harris’s loss to Trump in 2024. The report neglected to address Biden’s decision.
“He made a terrible mistake for himself, his legacy and for the country,” Clinton said.
During his 2020 campaign, Biden talked about being a bridge to the next generation, a comment that Democrats saw as a signal he planned to be a one-term president. He was 81 at the time of the 2024 election and in fragile health.
Clinton, who lost to Trump when she was the Democratic nominee in 2016, said Biden should have followed through on his suggestion that he would pass the torch.
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“I believe if he had kept to that plan and said, in, say, the late summer of ’23 that he wasn’t going to run, that he was going to pass, you know, the torch to the next generation, we would have had a real contest,” Clinton said.
Whoever emerged from that nomination fight, “whether it was the vice president, or a governor, or a senator, or anybody else, would have beaten Donald Trump,” she said.
A spokesman for Biden declined to comment.
Biden dropped out of the presidential race after a disastrous performance in a June 27, 2024 debate with Trump. Harris stepped in as the Democratic nominee but fell short in the election after a truncated and hastily assembled campaign.
Clinton was not always so dismissive of a second term for Biden, saying after an appearance at the Aspen Ideas Festival in 2022 that she would endorse the idea. “I would endorse our sitting president, yes, of course,” she said at the time.
But Democrats have taken a harsher view of Biden’s decision in recent times, with former first lady Jill Biden stirring discord by defending her husband in a recent memoir, “View From the East Wing.”
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