Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said that she was in “disbelief” at then-President Joe Biden’s disastrous showing in the 2024 presidential debate and that his decision to run for re-election was “a terrible mistake.”
“He made a terrible mistake for himself, his legacy and for the country,” Clinton said in an interview with The New Yorker’s David Remnick published on Monday.
“I think it was a terrible miscalculation on the part of President Biden,” she added. “But once he didn’t move and did not admit that he had said he was going to step aside and then decided not to, and held on for as long as he did, we were in a terrible dilemma.”
Clinton’s unfiltered remarks about her former colleague come on the heels of former first lady Jill Biden’s admission in her memoir that she thought her husband was having a stroke during the debate in June 2024. At the time, the former first lady put on a supportive front, praising her husband for doing a “great job” and for having “answered all the questions.”
It also comes as some Democrats are pushing party leadership for an honest assessment of and accountability for what went wrong for them in 2024, before the 2028 presidential campaign kicks off in earnest.
Joe Biden had been the oldest person to be inaugurated as president in January 2021 until Donald Trump returned to the White House four years later. Speculation about Biden’s health was largely dismissed while he was in office but became more urgent during the 2024 election.
Clinton, who has remained an influential figure in the Democratic Party after her 2016 election loss to Trump, said she knew there were people who tried to dissuade Biden from running. But, she said, “they were met with total denial, and not just from him but from the people around him.”
Many in the White House believed Biden could defeat Trump again, as he did in 2020, Clinton said. But when he stumbled through the June debate, some on the president’s team “kept trying to explain it, rationalize it, justify it,” she recalled.