The US president, Joe Biden, said on Tuesday that he is not sure he would be seeking re-election in next year’s election if he were not likely facing Republican Donald Trump.
“If Trump wasn’t running, I’m not sure I’d be running,” Biden said at a fundraising event for his 2024 campaign outside Boston. “We cannot let him win.”
The remarks came towards the end of his remarks as Biden spoke about the risks former President Trump poses to democracy, amid fears a second Trump term would be far more autocratic than the first.
Biden also talked about Trump’s renewed calls to get rid of the Affordable Care Act and how America is “the only nation built on an idea”.
In the past, Biden has spoken about how it was Trump’s remarks after the deadly white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017 that there were “fine people on both sides” that inspired him to challenge Trump in 2020.
“In that moment, I knew the threat to this nation was unlike any I had ever seen in my lifetime,” Biden said in a 2019 video announcing his run for president.
Last month senior Democrats sounded the alarm after an opinion poll showed Biden trailing the Republican frontrunner Trump in five out of six battleground states exactly a year before the presidential election.
Biden turned 81 earlier this month while Trump is 77, and polls show voters have concerns that both are too old to run again for the White House.
Earlier in Tuesday’s fundraising event Biden spoke at length about his support for Israel and the need to figure out what happens after the current conflict in Gaza.
“I’ve been a strong, strong supporter of Israel from the time I entered the United States Senate in 1973.”
