President Biden recently sat down for an interview with CBS, during which he addressed numerous topics, such as his withdrawal from the 2024 race and the possibility of former President Trump stepping back into the White House. However, Biden also repeated numerous false claims he has consistently touted despite being fact-checked on them.
Furthermore, host Robert Costa seemingly refused to push back and correct any of Biden’s dubious claims during the conversation. Additionally, the interview has been criticized for failing to challenge Biden with any challenging questions, such as those surrounding the evident failures of his administration that many voters are frustrated with.
The president told Costa, “The polls we had showed that it was the neck-and-neck race would have been down on the wire,” when speaking about his projected performance against Trump. In the aftermath of the notoriously poor debate performance against Trump in late June, polling showed that Biden was lagging behind Trump, leading many to call for the president to step down.
Biden also blamed his debate performance on being “sick,” maintaining that he had “no serious problem.” However, this is largely divorced from the widespread opinion that the president is suffering from an apparent decline in mental and physical health. He also added that he dropped out because he was so old that he “can’t even say how old I am.” Biden continued, “It’s hard for me to get it out of my mouth and, uh, but things got moving so quickly, it didn’t happen.”
The president further suggested that he decided to run for president after the riot in Charlottesville, Virginia, where he touted a disproven claim that Trump had referred to neo-Nazis as “very fine people,” a claim that has been decidedly debunked by Snopes. Biden also asserted that Trump represented the Ku Klux Klan during his presidency and that Trump brought the group “out of those woods with no hoods” because the former president was supposedly “an ally.” In this statement, Biden seemingly ignored Trump’s condemnation of white supremacy.
Moreover, Biden also made a false claim he often touts about his record with the economy. The president falsely claimed that he “created 16 million jobs, real new jobs.” However, this talking point is misleading as the vast majority of those jobs, approximately 9 million, were simply jobs that returned as society reopened from pandemic lockdowns. These jobs did not reflect a growing economy spurred by Biden’s policies.
During the interview, Biden also touched on the Democratic response to his debate performance, after which there were calls for him to step down. “But what happened was a number of my Democratic colleagues in the House and Senate thought that I was going to hurt them in the races, and I was concerned if I stayed in the race, that would be the topic you’d be interviewing about why did Nancy Pelosi say? Why did so and so…and I thought it’d be a real distraction,” Biden said.
Watch Biden below:
At another point in the interview, he claimed he wasn’t “confident” in a peaceful exchange of power in the upcoming election. “If Trump wins, no, I’m not confident at all. I mean if Trump loses I’m not confident at all,” he said. “He means what he says. We don’t take him seriously. He means it. All this stuff about ‘if we lose, it’ll be a bloodbath.’” The “bloodbath” talking point the left often cites revolves around comments taken entirely out of context in which Trump was clearly discussing an economic “bloodbath” where manufacturing jobs would be lost.
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