Former Vice President Kamala Harris said that former President Joe Biden did not want to take part in the June 2024 debate against then-Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump that led to the Democrat incumbent dropping his reelection bid.
“I was in LA at the Fairmont Hotel watching, taking vigorous notes,” Harris recalled in an episode of “The Diary of a CEO” podcast published Thursday. “He called me from the debate camp – the president did, Biden did – and I could tell something was a little off.”
She added, “I was concerned about … I don’t think he wanted to debate is my point. He didn’t want that debate.”
Harris said that competition, whether it’s sports or bidding on something, requires commitment from the participants and “if you don’t want to be in the competition, it will absolutely have an impact on your performance.”
“I’m pretty sure he did not want to debate,” she said.
When asked how she knew, Harris said that she and her former boss “had conversations about it.”
“I think he got talked into it,” she said, without indicating who might have pushed Biden to take the stage that night in Atlanta.
The former vice president said she had four interviews lined up after the debate, so she had tuned in to prepare.
“I’m watching the debate with my tight team, I wanted it to be a small team so I could just be candid as it’s happening … and in every debate, I don’t care who you are, there will be a statistic wrong or you name this country, but it was that country,” Harris said. “That always happens. There is no such thing as a perfect debate.”
“There will be something to clean up, and I expected that,” she said. “And then we saw what we all saw.”
Host Steven Bartlett, who described himself as “a little bit of a historian of these debates,” said Biden’s debate performance, which was widely panned in the immediate aftermath, was a “historic car crash.”
Biden delivered a shambolic performance while Trump battered him with attacks, stumbling over his words and sounding hoarse throughout.
Afterward, then-first lady Jill Biden led her husband off stage, raising more questions about the octogenarian’s fitness for office and another term.
Less than a month after the debate with Trump, Biden announced his exit from the presidential race and immediately endorsed Harris to be the Democratic Party’s nominee.
She was defeated by Trump in the Nov. 5 election.
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