Former President Joe Biden blames his one-time boss, former President Barack Obama, for the Democrats’ losing the White House, President Donald Trump said in a new interview. Trump, speaking in an interview Thursday for Spectator World, said that the revelation came when he went to the White House shortly after winning in November to meet with Biden.
Describing Biden as “angry,” Trump said that Biden started out talking quietly but started getting angrier.
“I asked him, ‘So who do you blame?'” Trump told interviewer Ben Domenech at the White House.
“He was very angry, you know, he was a very angry guy, actually,” said Trump. “And he said, ‘I blame Barack.'”
Trump said he never thinks of Obama by his first name, so he had to think about what Biden said “for a second.”
Trump added, “And he said, ‘And I blame Nancy Pelosi.'”
Trump said that when he asked Biden if he blamed Vice President Kamala Harris, who took his place on the ticket after he left the race, Biden said, “‘No, I don’t blame her,’ which was interesting. He didn’t blame her. … he told me he blamed those two people.”
Trump did not elaborate on why Biden said he blamed Obama for the Democrats’ loss to him.
However, others in Biden’s camp blamed Obama for the Democrats’ loss, reported The Telegraph just after the election.
“There is no singular reason why we lost, but a big reason is because the Obama advisers publicly encouraged Democratic infighting to push Joe Biden out, didn’t even want Kamala Harris as the nominee, and then signed up as the saviors of the campaign only to run outdated Obama-era playbooks for a candidate that wasn’t Obama,” a former Biden staffer told Politico.
Biden aides also told CNN at the time that there was a sense that Obama had contributed to the party’s defeat to Trump in 2016 as well, when he brokered a deal for Hillary Clinton as the Democratic Party nominee.
Obama also refused to endorse Harris’ candidacy at first, calling instead for an open convention to decide on a new nominee once Biden dropped out.
Biden left the 2024 race after making a lackluster appearance in the first presidential debate against Trump, who told Domenech that Biden “wasn’t looking good” when they faced off, as he was “very white, too white.”
“You know, if he did better in the debate, would he have been changed [out] or not?” Trump said. “If he was normal in the debate, would it have changed, or was the debate … he blames the debate for the reason he had to get out.”
Biden, after dropping out of the race, said in a television interview that he left when congressional Democrats were concerned that he would drag down their own chances of being reelected and because he thought his push for reelection would have problems after the debate performance.
“I was concerned, if I stayed in the race, that would be the topic — you’d be interviewing me about why did Nancy Pelosi say [something] … and I thought it’d be a real distraction,” he told “CBS News Sunday Morning” in his first interview after leaving the race and endorsing Harris.
“When I ran the first time, I thought of myself as being a transition president. I can’t even say how old I am — it’s hard for me to get it out of my mouth,” he added.
