Biden defends record in last interview – Washington Examiner
In his final interview as president, Joe Biden defended his record but acknowledged shortcomings regarding openness and communication.Speaking with journalist Lawrence O’Donnell on MSNBC, Biden admitted that his efforts to connect with voters, especially on economic issues, were inadequate. He noted that he had prioritized policy discussions over political messaging, which he believed had ultimately failed to resonate with the public.Biden’s presidency has seen fewer press conferences and interviews compared to previous administrations, and he chose not to hold a traditional exit press conference.The interview, lasting about an hour, also touched on topics such as the war in Ukraine and his concerns about his successor.
Biden defends record in raspy-voiced final interview
President Joe Biden sat down with MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell Thursday for the final interview of his presidency.
The president has largely failed on his vow to restore transparency to the White House after the tumultuous end of President-elect Donald Trump‘s first term in office.
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Biden seriously lags his immediate predecessors in terms of both total press conferences and sit-down interviews, and he’ll eschew the presidential tradition of holding an exit press conference.
White House officials say the president routinely fielded questions from reporters in unofficial settings. However, Thursday night, Biden did concede that his messaging strategy failed to yield results, especially when it came to connecting with voters on the economy.
“Ironically, I almost spent too much time on the policy, not enough time on the politics,” he told O’Donnell.
The roughly hour-long interview largely focused on Biden’s thoughts over his final days in office, and concerns about his once-predecessor-turned-successor, but O’Donnell did press Biden on both the war in Ukraine and the recent ceasefire deal signed by Israel and Hamas. O’Donnell did not ask the president about his withdrawal from Afghanistan.
The president claimed to definitively know that Russian President Vladimir Putin would in fact invade Ukraine “about three weeks before he amassed those extra troops on the border.”
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Biden added that his historic trip to Ukraine to mark the one-year anniversary of the war proceeded against the warnings of his advisors but was willing to gamble that Putin would not “dare take out an American president.”
“My concern was, if we didn’t go, we didn’t show up, then who leads? What happens?,” he explained. “I wanted them to know that we were with them, and it was the best way to do that.”
On the ceasefire agreement, Biden claimed that he never discussed the ongoing negotiations with Trump but that the White House brought in “his national security people” to “tell them what was happening as we hand this off.”
Biden additionally claimed that he first pressed Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to try to avoid limiting civilian casualties in Gaza during his trip to Israel in the week’s following the October 7 attack, but that Netanyahu rebuffed that advice by harkening back to U.S. bombing campaigns on Germany during World War II.
“He said to me, well, you did it. You carpet bombed, not his exact words, but you carpet bombed Berlin,” the president told O’Donnell. “You dropped a nuclear weapon. You killed thousands of innocent people because you had to in order to win a war.
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As for concerns about the future, the president declined to specifically mention Trump by name, but, like in his farewell address to the nation, touted the need for “guardrails” to protect against “this concentration of enormous wealth and power” influencing politics potentially to the detriment of the working class.
“You’ve known me a long time. I really am concerned about how fragile democracy is. That sounds corny, but I mean, I really, really am concerned,” the president stated. “I really think we’re in an inflection point in history here. We’re unrelated to any particular leader. Things are going to change drastically, and it occurs every five or six generations.”
“Look, if the decision is made that the multi billionaires, the super, super wealthy, the wealthiest people in the world begin to control all the apparatuses, from the media to the economy, then who do I get to fight back for me?,” Biden continued. “I think everybody deserves just a shot, not a guarantee, just a shot. How the hell can you make it in society today if you don’t have access to an education, you don’t have access to adequate health care, you don’t have access to the opportunity to have a job that you can handle, where you can make ends meet?”
The interview concluded with the president discussing his family, specifically his two sons, Hunter and the late Beau Biden.
Biden declared that Beau was a “better man than I am” and remarked how both of his sons “have always had faith in my instincts.”
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