In his first interview since withdrawing from his re-election bid last month, President Biden told “CBS Sunday Morning” that he made his decision, in part, so that the Democratic Party could fully concentrate on what he believes is an urgent task at hand: preventing former President Donald Trump from regaining the White House.

Speaking with CBS News chief election & campaign correspondent Robert Costa, Mr. Biden said that he made his historic decision at his family home in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, in late July, just weeks after his debate with Trump, which caused concern in some Democratic circles.

“The polls we had showed that it was a neck-and-neck race, would have been down to the wire,” Mr. Biden said. “But what happened was, a number of my Democratic colleagues in the House and Senate thought that I was gonna hurt them in the races. And I was concerned if I stayed in the race, that would be the topic. You’d be interviewing me about ‘Why did Nancy Pelosi say…’ ‘Why did so-and-so…’ And I thought it’d be a real distraction, number one.

“Number two, when I ran the first time, I thought of myself as being a transition President. I can’t even say how old I am; it’s hard for me to get it outta my mouth. But things got moving so quickly, it didn’t happen.”

Added to that combination, he said, was “the critical issue for me still – it’s not a joke – maintaining this democracy. I thought it was important. Because, although it’s a great honor being president, I think I have an obligation to the country to do what [is] the most important thing you can do, and that is, we must, we must, we must defeat Trump.”

President Biden announced his decision on Sunday, July 21, and addressed the nation from the Oval Office three days later, saying that he would not let anything, even “personal ambition,” get in the way of “saving our democracy.”

Following his speech, he was joined by members of his family. Asked what he told them after his historic address, Mr. Biden replied, “It’s what they said to me. They said – my grandchildren call me Pop, my children call me Dad. And they said they were proud, and it mattered to me a lot.”

Costa then asked about the president’s late son, Beau Biden, who died in 2015. “When I saw you with your family in the Oval, I wondered, is he thinking of Beau, too?”

Mr. Biden paused. “Look, I can honestly say that I think of him all the time. Whenever I have a decision that’s really hard to make, I literally ask myself, ‘What would Beau do?’ He should be sitting here being interviewed, not me. He was really a fine man. You know, Beau was committed to my staying committed. We had a conversation toward the end when he was … we, everybody, we knew he wasn’t going to live. And he said, ‘Dad, I know, we know what’s gonna happen. I’m gonna be okay, Dad. I’m all right. I’m not afraid. But Dad, you gotta make me a promise.’ I said, ‘What’s that, Beau?’ He said, ‘I know when it happens, you’re gonna want to quit. You’re not gonna stay engaged …. Look at me. Look at me, Dad. Give me your word as a Biden. When I go, you’ll stay engaged. Give me your word. Give me your word.’ And I did.

“And that’s why – I had not planned on running after he died, and then Charlottesville happened.”

On August 12, 2017, white supremacist demonstrations in Charlottesville, Virginia turned deadly when Heather Heyer, a civil rights activist, was murdered in what the Justice Department called a “hate-inspired act of domestic terrorism.”

Mr. Biden has long traced his decision to run in 2020 to that moment – the beginning of his journey to the presidency.

Costa asked, “As you look at American democracy seven years later, how do you see it?”

“When I spoke to the mom who lost her daughter as a consequence of neo-Nazis and right [wing], white supremacists coming out of fields in America with torches, carrying Nazi banners, singing the same, sick antisemitic bile that was sung in Germany in the ’30s, and when her daughter was killed, the press went to then-President Trump and said, ‘What do you think?’ He said, ‘There are very fine people on both sides.’ I knew then, I knew I had to do something. And that’s why I decided to run, because democracy was literally at stake.”

Mr. Biden explained that the Republican nominee’s talk underscores his concerns that a second Trump term would undermine democracy.

“He evidenced everything that we thought,” Mr. Biden said. “Now, January 6th, attack on the Capitol, he talks about now, because he now talks about making sure they’re all, you know, let out of prison. He’s gonna pardon them. Think of this. Every other time the Ku Klux Klan has been involved they wore hoods so they’re not identified. Under his presidency, they came out of those woods with no hoods, knowing they had an ally. That’s how I read it. They knew they had an ally in the White House. And he stepped up for them.”

Mr. Biden said he is not confident that there would be a peaceful transfer of power should Trump [who refused to acknowledge his election loss in 2020] lose in November to Vice President Kamala Harris.

 “If Trump wins … I mean, if Trump loses, I’m not confident at all,” Mr. Biden said. “He means what he says. We don’t take him seriously. He means it. All the stuff about, ‘If we lose, it’ll be a bloodbath …’ 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 gonna ‘count the votes,’ right?”

Repeating his familiar maxim about politics in a democracy, President Biden said, “You can’t love your country only when you win.”

Trump has said his remarks on Charlottesville were not intended to praise white nationalists, and that he was warning of economic carnage when he said “bloodbath.”

But Trump isn’t the only thing on Mr. Biden’s mind, with five months left in his presidency.

Asked if he believes a ceasefire is possible in Israel’s war with Hamas before he leaves office, Mr. Biden replied, “Yes. It’s still possible. The plan I put together, endorsed by the G7, endorsed by the U.N. Security Council, et cetera, is still viable. And I’m working literally every single day – and my whole team – to see to it that it doesn’t escalate into a regional war. But it easily can.”

When Mr. Biden entered office in early 2021, he had an ambitious agenda. Costa said, “Some Senators told me, in March of 2021, you took them into the Oval Office and pointed up at FDR’s portrait and said, ‘We’re going big. We’re going in that direction.'”

“I did,” Mr. Biden said. “And we have, with the great help of so many people. Look, democracy works. And it was very important to prove that it worked, prove that it worked. I mean, look at what we’ve been able to do: We created 16 million jobs, I mean, real new jobs. We’ve gotten around a brink of having the private sector invest over a trillion dollars – a trillion dollars – in the American economy. One of the things I fought for as a Senator for a long time was to change the dynamic of how we grow the economy, not from the top down, but from the bottom up. The idea of trickle-down economics doesn’t work, in my view.”

Asked if he would project that pride in his administration’s record by going on the campaign trail with Harris, Mr. Biden said yes. “I talk to her frequently, and by the way, I’ve known her running mate is a great guy. As we say, if we grew up in the same neighborhood, we’d have been friends. He’s my kind of guy. He’s real, he’s smart. I’ve known him for several decades. I think it’s a hell of a team.”

“To those who have expressed skepticism about how much you’ll be on the trail, or about the rest of your term, raised questions about your health, what do you say to them?” asked Costa.

“All I can say is, ‘Watch.’ That’s all,” Mr. Biden replied. “Look, I had a really, really bad day in that debate because I was sick. But I have no serious problem.

“I was talking to Governor Shapiro, who’s a friend. We have got to win Pennsylvania, my original home state. He and I are putting together a campaign tour in Pennsylvania. I’m going to be campaigning in other states as well. And I’m going to do whatever Kamala thinks I can do to help most.”

Mr. Biden talked with “CBS Sunday Morning” in the president’s private residence, in the White House Treaty Room, where historic peace agreements have been signed, beneath a portrait of Ulysses S. Grant, the general-turned-president who labored to restore the Union after the Civil War.

Asked how he wishes history to remember him, President Biden replied, “That he proved democracy can work. It got us out of a pandemic. It produced the single greatest economic recovery in American history. We’re the most powerful economy in the world. We have more to do. And it demonstrated that we can pull the nation together.

“Look, I’ve always believed, and I still do, the American people are good and decent, honorable people,” he said. “When I announced my candidacy to run way back for President, I said, ‘We’ve got to do three things: Restore the soul of America; build the economy from the middle out and the bottom up, not the top down; and bring the country together.’ No one thought we could get done – including some of my own people – what we got done.

“One of the problems is, I knew all the things we did were going to take a little time to work their way through,” he continued. “So now, people are realizing, ‘Oh, that highway, oh, that …’ The biggest mistake we made, we didn’t put up signs saying, ‘Joe did it’!”

Four years ago, what “Joe” did was defeat Donald Trump. Now, with Trump attempting to return to the White House, the president is sounding the alarm in a way sitting presidents rarely, if ever, do.

“The stakes are that high to you?” asked Costa.

“I give you my word, I think they’re that high,” Mr. Biden said. “Mark my words: If he wins this nomination, I mean, excuse me, this election, watch what happens. It’s a danger. He’s a genuine danger to American security.

“Look, we’re at an inflection point in world history, we really are,” the president said. “The decisions we make in the last three, four years, and the next three or four years are going to determine what the next six decades look like. And democracy is the key. And that’s why I went down and made that speech in Johnson Center about the Supreme Court. Supreme Court is so out of whack, so out of whack. And so, I proposed that we limit terms to 18 years.

“There’s little regard by the MAGA Republicans for the political institutions,” he said. “That’s what holds this country together. That’s what democracy’s about. That’s who we are as a nation.”

       
Story produced by Ed Forgotson. Editor: Carol A. Ross.

Robert Costa

Robert Costa is the Chief Election & Campaign correspondent for CBS News, where he covers national politics and American democracy.