President Joe Biden said Wednesday that he doesn’t have confidence there’ll be a peaceful transition of power if former President Donald Trump loses in November, pointing to comments from the Republican nominee suggesting the only way he’d lose is if the election is stolen from him.
“If Trump wins, no, I’m not confident at all,” Biden said in an interview with CBS News, before correcting himself. “I mean, if Trump loses, I’m not confident at all. He means what he says, we don’t take him seriously, he means it — all the stuff about if we lose, there’ll be a bloodbath, it will have to be a stolen election,” he added in his first interview since ending his campaign, which is expected to air in full Sunday morning.
Trump warned in March that if he lost the 2024 election it would be a “bloodbath” for the US auto industry and the country — comments Biden and his campaign quickly leapt on, claiming the former president was inciting political violence.
Biden has long warned that Trump is unlikely to concede the election if he loses, making the issue of protecting democracy a central tenet of his 2024 campaign. In remarks from the Oval Office last month explaining his decision to end his campaign, Biden sought to contrast Trump’s refusal to accept election results with his own decision to step aside as the Democratic nominee.
“Look, I’m not the guy that said I want to be a dictator on day one. I’m not the guy that refused to accept the outcome of the election,” he said at the time. “I’m not the guy who said that he wouldn’t accept the outcome of this election automatically. You can’t only love your country when you win.”
Since then, the president has largely remained out of sight with a limited public schedule. Aside from remarks announcing a successful prisoner exchange with Russia and welcoming those Americans back stateside and a brief trip to Texas to mark the anniversary of the Civil Rights Act and mourn the death of the late Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, Biden has had no public events since ending his campaign, largely ceding media coverage to Vice President Kamala Harris, who he endorsed.
Biden on Wednesday also warned that Trump was preparing to challenge the election results again in November as he did in 2020, including by putting in place sympathetic local election officials.
“Look, what they’re trying to do now in the local election districts where people count the votes … they’re putting people in place in states that they’re going to count the votes, right?” he said. “You can’t love your country only when you win.”
