President Joe Biden told Democratic donors Tuesday he wasn’t confident he’d be seeking another term if his predecessor, Donald Trump, wasn’t running for the White House, a notably candid assessment of his re-election rationale as he enters a likely rematch with his 2020 rival.
“If Trump wasn’t running, I’m not sure I’d be running,” he said, saying Democrats “cannot let him win.”
The comment, made during a fundraiser at a private home outside Boston, offered perhaps the starkest rationale to date for Biden’s re-election decision-making, and, according to sources familiar with the matter, took senior Biden campaign officials and advisers by surprise, CNN states.
“Yikes,” one top campaign adviser responded upon learning of the comments.
The campaign was quick to try to shrug off the president’s quip as a “nothing-to-see-here” moment, pointing out that Biden has always described Trump as a unique threat to the country, and that he had expressed similar sentiments about his decision to run for president around the 2020 campaign.
“President Biden said in 2020 he was running to restore the soul of our nation – he got into the race after Trump said what he did after Charlottesville – and he correctly views the former president as a unique threat to our democracy,” Delaware Sen. Chris Coons, a national co-chair of Biden’s 2024 campaign, told CNN. “President Biden beat Trump before and he will do it again.”
The earlier comment came as Biden began a fundraising sprint Tuesday before an expensive re-election race. He is expected to raise more than $15 million over five days through high-dollar fundraisers and grassroots efforts, a source with knowledge of the campaign’s fundraising said.
Biden headlined three fundraisers in the Boston area on Tuesday, the first of seven events between now and Monday, with more scheduled for later this month. Democratic officials are looking ahead to what some believe could be a billion-dollar campaign, as Biden works to sell his reelection to a public that, at least for now, appears sceptical.
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Biden took on Trump directly in the first of those fundraisers, warning that his predecessor is “telling us what he’s going to do. He’s making no bones about it.”
“Trump’s not even hiding the ball anymore. He’s telling us what he’s going to do. He’s making no bones about it,” Biden told donors, according to reporters in the room.
Biden referenced Trump’s recent focus on terminating the Affordable Care Act, as well as the former president’s “vermin” remark. The former president said in a speech in New Hampshire last month: “We will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country,” and warned that “the real threat is not from the radical right. The real threat is from the radical left, and it’s growing every day.”
The president noted that Trump did not show up to his inauguration, saying in part: “I can’t say I was disappointed, but he didn’t even show up.” Reporters in the room said this drew some laughs from the audience.
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