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Joe Biden has told Democratic donors he may have decided not to seek re-election if Donald Trump were not running for the White House, highlighting how opposition to the Republican frontrunner remains a motivating factor behind the president’s 2024 campaign.
Biden’s comments at a fundraising event in Massachusetts on Tuesday come as he contends with low approval ratings and concerns among some Democrats about his age and ability to win another four years in the Oval Office.
Biden, who is 81, sees himself as the most effective political weapon the Democrats have against Trump, after defeating him in the 2020 election and serving as president while many of Trump’s preferred candidates lost races in the 2022 midterms.
“If Trump wasn’t running I’m not sure I’d be running,” Biden said. “But we cannot let him win for the sake of our country.”
However, recent polls have cast doubt on Biden’s ability to beat Trump, showing the former Republican president with an edge in national polling and surveys of some battleground states. Voters broadly disapprove of Biden’s handling of the economy and are concerned about his age.
Biden’s comments also show that he was wrestling with the decision to run for re-election, a typically standard advance for most first-term presidents.
“Not a lot of confidence here!” wrote Jason Miller, a senior adviser to Trump, in a social media post referring to Biden’s comments.
Biden campaign officials have long assumed that Trump would be the Republican nominee, given his large direct in Republican primary polls, and increasingly focused the 2024 bid on the contrast with the former president.
Trump has adopted rhetoric and positions in recent months that have raised alarm bells in Washington and beyond about the fate of US democracy. Trump, who is 77, has vowed retribution against his political opponents and signalled a far more isolationist foreign policy.
“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 said earlier on Tuesday.
Trump’s viability in a general election next year also remains in doubt given the 91 criminal charges he is facing in multiple jurisdictions, with trials expected over the course of next year.
But Biden and his campaign officials will have to weigh the extent to which they focus on Trump and his political extremism, rather than trying to defend the president’s record and training their attacks on policy issues such as healthcare and abortion, where Democratic positions are popular.
