I can hear your passion. I can hear your anxiety that the world is is changing the way it has. And for a long time you believed. You said, I'm the man who can stop Donald Trump. And you did once. And in the end, you withdrew from that election campaign at the last minute. [00:00:20] It's a question, you know, lots of people ask you, Mr. President. Did you leave it too late? Should you have withdrawn earlier, given someone else a bigger chance? I don't I don't think it would have mattered. [00:00:37] That was former President Joe Biden, and he sat down for an interview with BBC host Nick Robinson, in which Robinson asked him if he regretted his decision to drop out of the presidential race when he did, and not sooner. The tldr of it is that no, he doesn't. [00:00:54] But before we discuss, let's hear more of his response. We left at a time when We had a good candidate. She is fully funded. And what happened was. [00:01:12] I had become what we had set out to do. No one thought we could do and become so successful in our. Our agenda was hard to say. Now I'm going to stop now. I meant when I said when I started that. I think I'm prepared to hand this to the next generation. [00:01:30] It's a transition government, but things move so quickly that it made it difficult to walk away to get. And it was a it was a hard decision. [00:01:46] But, regrets though? No, I think it was the right decision. I think that, the well, it was just a difficult decision. [00:02:03] So it seems as though he has a lot of complicated feelings around it. And yeah, I imagine it was a very hard decision to come by. I have my own thoughts and feelings on it, as I'm sure most of you do, but let's just look back a little bit back to July of 2024 to get a reminder [00:02:20] of where the country was at at the time. This is how the sentiment was following the June 2024 presidential debate. And Joe Biden didn't perform as well as most people were hoping that he would. So 56% of Democrats and 67% of all Americans believe Biden should withdraw, [00:02:41] given his performance in the debate. The Washington Post ABC News Ipsos poll found while new highs of 85% of Americans say Biden is too old for a second term and 60% say the same of Trump. Both men receive 46% support among all registered voters, nearly unchanged from [00:03:01] the last edition of the poll in April. Another poll released by the Pew Research Center was not any better for Biden, finding that Trump leads the incumbent 50% to 47% in a head to head matchup among registered voters. [00:03:16] Trump's lead has widened marginally from April, when Pew reported that 49% favored him and 48 chose Biden. So after Biden finally decided to drop out of the race in July, he named Kamala Harris, as, you know, the new candidate, and he bypassed [00:03:36] the entire primary process in doing so. There was a lot of feelings around that as well at the time, but The New York Times published an article with this headline. Americans may not agree on much, but they agree Biden made the right choice. The president's decision to exit the race received overwhelming support. [00:03:54] Only a few other things have drawn as much consensus in polling. The article also cites a New York Times Siena College poll that found that 87% of registered voters approved of Biden's decision to drop out of the race, with only 9% disapproving. [00:04:11] Was. I know that July of last year seems like forever ago. Like a lifetime ago. So much has happened since then, but it is. It is interesting to kind of get back into that headspace of where the entire country was at. It did feel very, very hopeless after that debate. [00:04:28] I remember that feeling, and it's just like what's going to happen. And I was of the impression that there's no way this guy is going to drop out of the race. It was way too close to November at the time that we were even having these discussions. Jake was very adamant that it was going to happen. He turned out to be right, and that's why he's Jake. [00:04:45] But now we're getting this interview with Joe Biden after we've been enduring over 100 days of the Trump administration, and it has not been an easy 100 days. And to hear him come out and say he wouldn't have done anything differently for on, you know, on one hand, I feel like this doesn't change anything. [00:05:03] It doesn't matter how he feels about it, really, and he's obviously still processing his own feelings about it. But at the same time, I feel, I don't want to say betrayed. I feel like that's too strong of a word. But I do feel like that seems like a personal thing that he was going through, [00:05:21] and he put the entire country in flux because of it, and it feels a little irresponsible. It feels inconsiderate, really. And maybe I'm just too in my feelings about it, but that's how it comes across to me. What do you think? I think Joe Biden has an ego that works in such a way that he is just simply [00:05:40] incapable of any level of public humility. This dude's own self stated mission. We didn't put this on him. This is what Joe Biden claimed. He's the guy that's saving the country from Trump. [00:05:56] He's the guy that's giving us all of this stability. ET cetera. ET cetera. Never mind the fact that even in 2020, he was already cooked and the fact of the pandemic made it so that he barely had the campaign. They had that built in excuse to to hide him from everybody because of Covid. [00:06:14] It's like, oh, we gotta avoid crowds. ET cetera. ET cetera. And he was basically able to run this basically shell campaign shell of a campaign. And he won anyway. And good for him. The establishment wanted Joe Biden. They got what he wanted and he deserves the credit for beating Trump. [00:06:30] However, I don't see how he can see the results of won the election. And now two with Trump is actually doing in office and say he has no regrets whatsoever about how he handled his departure [00:06:46] from the 2024 presidential campaign. That makes absolutely no sense, and it just shows you the level of egomania of this guy and deliriousness of this dude that he thinks what he did was right. And just the idea that, you know, stealing the opportunity for the Democratic base [00:07:06] to have a primary where the actual voters got to decide on a candidate after a rigorous, you know, primary, primary process where the strongest candidate would have emerged [00:07:23] and been more better suited to beating Donald Trump and doing stuff like, I don't know, talking to a freaking podcaster for an hour and a half, right? Like, you would think that we would have been able to have a nice enough process that somebody who could stand up to that level of scrutiny, [00:07:39] you know, would have emerged victorious. Instead, we get Joe and also too and I know you guys covered this on tight. I forget if it was political or who recovered this. I'm sorry. I forgive the people who reported on this. But Joe Biden telling Kamala Harris before her first debate, [00:07:56] quote unquote, no daylight kid. Meaning run exactly as I, I would have, even though I was getting trounced in the polls and everybody should have been doing their best to run. Exactly far away as possible as they could. [00:08:11] I think if Joe Biden gave a damn about the country, gave a damn about his party, gave a damn about winning, he would have approached this interview with some humility and be like, look, we lost. How could I have no regrets about how I handled things? Maybe in the recesses of my mind, these things I could have did different [00:08:30] to balance the scales in favor of my party and ultimately the American people who I care about so much. He can't even bring himself to do that. I think it's quite pathetic and embarrassing. Yeah, you have to wonder why he even agreed to do this interview. [00:08:46] He did do it with the BBC. Not in, you know, an American network. Not that that really matters because. He thinks people don't get BBC in America. - Like we're obviously still. - Watching it here, right? We're still talking about it over here. But you're right. You know, it does take a certain level of narcissism [00:09:01] to even want to be the president. Right? You look at this job that is the most difficult job in the world, the most visible job in the world. You're over not just all of your American constituents, but the things that you do, the decisions that you make impact people around the world. [00:09:16] And you look at that and you say, you know what? I'm the best person for that job, that you have to be a little crazy, if not a little bit narcissistic, to even want that job, to think that you're capable of performing that job, and to think that you're good enough to win. But, you know, yeah, I think I agree with you. [00:09:33] You know, like, I'm just I'm not sympathetic anymore to their feelings and to their lack of insight into the American people and what we want and to they're out of touch with what we want. We were telling them we were begging Joe Biden to step aside, to not run for reelection for so long. [00:09:49] And he just said, you know what? No, I'm going to do it. And now he's doing this interview and he's saying, yeah, it was hard for me to step away. And I, I can sympathize with that. But when you're in, again, such a public role and such a crucial role, right, everything you do is affecting millions and millions of people. [00:10:06] You don't get to have that luxury of like, oh, you know, like I'm a little bit in my feelings. My ego is a little hurt right now by all of this. And on top of that, we have so many elderly Congress people, and I'm speaking specifically about Democrats. Obviously, it's on the Republican side too, but the Democrats are the ones [00:10:23] that I feel more like are letting me down. Nancy Pelosi will not leave Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Rest in peace. She put us in quite a pickle by not stepping down. And I know she thought she was doing the right thing, but she really wasn't helping [00:10:39] a lot of people in doing so. And then there was another elderly congressperson. I can't remember his name right now, but he said that stepping down from from his seat right now in Congress would feel like giving up on his entire life. That's not really my problem, though. You know what I mean? [00:10:54] Like, you need to deal with that on your own. Figure it out yourself, figure out your legacy, what it all means, and then, like, don't make it everyone's problem. So millions of people's problem. Every time you ring the bell below, an angel gets his wings. Totally not true. [00:11:10] But it does keep you updated on our live shows.