Kamala Harris suggests Biden ‘didn’t want’ debate against Trump, says ‘something was a little off’
Former Vice President Kamala Harris suggested during a Thursday podcast appearance that former President Joe Biden “didn’t want” to debate President Donald Trump in 2024. She added that “something was a little off” prior to the former president’s now-infamous debate performance, which ultimately ended his campaign.
“He [Biden] called me from debate camp. The president did, Biden did. And I could tell something was a little off,” Harris recalled. “And I was concerned about… I don’t think he wanted to debate is my point. He didn’t want that debate.”
“Diary of a CEO” podcast host Steven Bartlett noted that “it was so apparently clear” that something was “not OK” with Biden during the 2024 debate, and pressed the former vice president on why “the Democratic side of politics was pretending everything was okay.”
“You must have known,” Bartlett told Harris.
While Harris did not directly answer whether she believed Biden was unfit to be on the debate stage, she offered insight into what might have led to the debate going awry for the former president.
“You know, it’s like any competition you go in, whether it’s you’re bidding for something, if it’s sports, you got to want it,” she told Bartlett. “If you don’t want to be in the competition, it will absolutely have an impact on your performance. And I don’t think he, I’m pretty sure he did not want to debate.”
Bartlett followed up by asking how Harris knew Biden didn’t want to debate and whether there had been any signs foreshadowing his poor performance.
“Well, we had conversations about it. I think he got talked into it,” Harris conceded.
“You know, in every debate, I don’t care who you are, there will be statistics wrong or, you know, you name this country, but it was that country. That always happens. There is no such thing as a perfect debate. So there will be something to clean up. And I expected that. And then, you know, we saw what we all saw,” she added.
Biden’s debate performance against Trump in 2024 was widely viewed as a failure, with the Democratic president tripping over his words, losing his train of thought and speaking in a raspy voice attributed to a cold during the event.
This isn’t the first time Harris has discussed her reaction to the debate. In her new political memoir, “107 Days,” she wrote that she was stunned by Biden’s response about his administration’s chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021, which left 13 U.S. service members dead.
Harris argued that Biden missed an easy question on the military and omitted any acknowledgment of the 13 U.S. service members who died during the Afghanistan withdrawal. She also pointed to his claims that he was “the only president this century” and “this decade” who did not have any troops “dying anywhere in the world.”
Another question was also on the military, and included Biden omitting an acknowledgment of the horrific attack that plagued his administration as one of its greatest failures.
“He’s got so much material on this — Trump calling our fallen soldiers ‘suckers and losers,'” Harris wrote of what ran through her head when Biden was asked about his role as commander in chief.
“He managed to get off that line but had stepped on it earlier by saying no one had died in wars overseas on his watch, seeming to forget the thirteen marines who died in the bomb blast at the airport during the evacuation of Afghanistan. I’d been on Air Force Two when it happened, and we had to change our flight plan to get back to D.C. in the face of that tragedy. How could he overlook that day?” she wrote, expressing her surprise over the response, but misidentifying those who were all killed as members of the Marines Corps.
Fox News Digital reached out to a representative of former President Biden for comment but did not immediately receive a response.
Fox News’ Emma Colton contributed to this report.
