‘Hell, I was living it’: Joe Biden airs his frustration with Democratic critics in new memoir

(CNN) — Responding almost point by point to his many critics over the last two-and-a-half years, Joe Biden devotes a full chapter of his new memoir to rebutting questions about his mental acuity, his decision to seek reelection, and how he thinks he was treated unfairly in the response to his infamous tanking of his debate with Donald Trump.

“The difference in 2024 was not that I had a bad debate. Lots of presidents had bad debates. The difference was that every other president was given the chance to redeem themselves in a second debate. As it turned out, that chance would not be available to me,” the former president writes in “Promise Me, America,” according to the text of a chapter obtained by CNN.

A few pages later, Biden adds that he was aware of the political trouble he was in during that three-week period when the calls for him to drop out mounted and he remained largely out of sight.

“The widely held assumption that I wasn’t following what was happening could not have been more at odds with reality. I followed it. Hell, I was living it. I knew exactly how many Democratic members of Congress and governors had pulled their support of me. I did phone calls with sitting members of Congress where no one held back,” Biden writes. “I wasn’t living in a dream world. Here’s where I was living: I had won the Democratic nomination for president. And I had won it decisively. I had a real record of achievement as president. I had a vision for the future that I thought was right for the nation.

“I believed I was the best person to lead the world. Was I old? Yes. Was I able to do the job? Yes. Were voters angry about inflation? Yes. Were they angry about immigration? Yes. All tough problems. But not insurmountable ones.”

“I knew better than anyone how old I was,” he added. “I knew what I was — and wasn’t — capable of doing. I carefully monitored how I was meeting the demands of the job. And there is not a single example of me failing to handle my responsibilities.”

The former president, deep in treatment for stage IV prostate cancer that has spread to his bones, has not spoken much publicly since leaving office, and announced on Sunday that he was curtailing in-person promotion for “Promise Me, America.”

But he uses the book to mount a lengthy, personal defense of himself, pointing to statistics from his record in office and details from his meetings with Democratic leaders – including former Vice President Kamala Harris and former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi – in his deliberations throughout the chapter obtained by CNN.

Biden starts by detailing the conversations with his top advisers who he says all supported his decision, made in April 2023, to launch his reelection campaign — including at a final meeting in the White House which included Harris: “We went around the room. Everyone offered their thoughts on the race. Everyone was in. There was no demurral or dissent. I was in.”

“I had thought long and hard about running for reelection. I knew the concerns about my age. I knew how hard it would be on my family. I knew how hard it was going to be, both doing the job of president and running for president. I had asked the hard questions of myself. Could I do it? Did I still want to do it? Was there anyone else to do it? I answered that yes, physically I would be able to do the job. And that not only did I want to do it, I wanted to do it more than ever,” Biden writes.

He adds, “People say I was deluding myself that I could do the job at my age. My answer to that is: I was doing the job. And I thought that if given the choice between me, with a full picture of both my age and my accomplishments, and Donald Trump, with a full picture of his chaos and disregard for democracy, the choice was clear. Beyond that, I thought I further benefited from comparison.”

As for Harris, Biden writes, when she heard that he and his longtime closest aide Mike Donilon had settled on the theme of “Freedom” for his campaign, “Kamala responded favorably. She talked about how powerfully the freedom message was resonating in the events she was holding around the country. She believed that people heard it, rightly, as about more than a woman’s right to choose, an issue she had been discussing regularly. It was also about a broader set of individual liberties and constitutional rights,” Biden writes. “This message was directly in her wheelhouse. And she was really good at delivering it.”

Harris wrote in her own memoir of the 2024 campaign that in hindsight, she feels it was “recklessness” to leave the decision to the president and then-first lady Jill Biden. “It’s Joe and Jill’s decision. We all said that, like a mantra, as if we’d all been hypnotized,” Harris wrote.

Biden told People magazine in an interview published Wednesday that he felt “lousy” before knowing about his cancer, which was disclosed after he left the White House, and added he would not have attempted to mount another campaign had he known he was sick.

Slamming the Hur report and Netanyahu

Many Democrats around the country remain deeply bitter about Biden, blaming his decision to seek reelection, his crash in the debate and the late-stage replacement of Harris as leading to Trump’s eventual victory. Biden was hardly seen on the campaign trail this year during what became a massive victory for Democrats in the midterms.

Biden writes repeatedly that he remains sure he was the best Democrat to beat Trump. He notes that he wasn’t seriously challenged in the 2024 primary, winning the New Hampshire primary via a write-in campaign after his name didn’t appear on the ballot due to a party dispute over internal rules. He did face the Uncommitted protest movement over his handling of the Israel-Hamas war that led to defections in Michigan and Minnesota.

Still, Biden argues, “the press and pundits kept talking about how weak I was. But every purportedly serious candidate decided not to run against me because I was too strong. The primaries sent no warning signs that I was in trouble. But that couldn’t derail the narrative setting in on my candidacy. That I was too old. That I was declining mentally.”

Biden directly rebuts those who say that assessment was proven by his interview with special prosecutor Robert Hur, whose report in February 2024, including multiple comments about the president’s faulty memory, dropped like a bombshell. The interview, Biden notes, was conducted in the days immediately following the Hamas attack on Israel on October 7, 2023.

“Being president requires a remarkable amount of gear shifting every day — from negotiating with foreign leaders to pursuing domestic policy, from visiting a disaster site to rubbing elbows with fundraisers. Hur’s commentary was especially outrageous when you think about the context of the interview that he based it on. I sat down for over five hours with Hur and his people across October 8 and 9 of 2023,” Biden writes.

“I had been up all night dealing with the aftershocks of a profound change to the global order. Go ask the Israeli leadership if they thought they were dealing with a diminished president that day. Go watch the address I gave to the nation that day and ask yourself if I was old and enfeebled. Or watch the trip I took to Israel eleven days later.”

Biden takes similar aim at those who believe he was hoodwinked by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu over the Israeli response to October 7, and not doing enough to limit Israel’s offensive in Gaza.

“I had been calling on Israel to take precautions to reduce civilian suffering since the beginning of the conflict,” Biden writes. “I had expressed these concerns privately in many conversations with Bibi, who acknowledged the damage that these rising casualties were doing to Israel’s image, and to US support for the war. But a familiar pattern established itself: He would promise to do more, and then another aggressive action would follow, killing more civilians. When we called them on it, the Israelis always had an explanation or excuse, but the result was the same. Bibi had no qualms about making promises he had no power — or intention — to keep.”

Biden’s relationship with Netanyahu stretches back decades. He writes how fed up he became in that period.

“While I understood that he was working under severe pressures, I was frustrated by his failure to think like a statesman and safeguard Israel’s long-term interests, not just his own short-term political needs,” Biden writes.

What Biden writes about Pelosi, Schumer and Obama, and what pushed him to drop out

Amid all this, by the time Biden got to the debate stage, he says that he was weighed down by his son Hunter’s then-just concluding criminal trial the exhaustion of doing the job, and being caught off guard by Trump’s aggressive demeanor and willingness to veer from facts.

“It didn’t feel right from the start,” Joe Biden notes.

“While I knew I was having a terrible night, I thought Trump’s defiantly untruthful answers about his responsibility for January 6, and his refusal to say he would accept the results of the upcoming election, were disqualifying,” he writes.

Jill Biden, when she was promoting her memoir, said in a television interview that she thought her husband might have been having a stroke. Biden doesn’t address that in his book, but he writes that as they left the debate venue together, she asked “How do you feel?”

“Well, I screwed that up.’ Except my language was harsher,” he writes of his response.

But with all the uproar that followed, Biden writes he remained torn about what to do. A final straw for him was learning that Washington Sen. Patty Murray was going to release a letter signed by many Democratic senators calling on him to drop out, going public with what they had told Biden aides in a private meeting several days earlier.

“This weighed heavily on me, because even at that point, not a lot of leaders had been willing to put their names to a call for me to withdraw. And I wasn’t just thinking about the people who wanted me to withdraw,” Biden writes. “I was also thinking about the people who wanted me to stay in. The Congressional Black Caucus. Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. John Fetterman. Bernie Sanders. Jim Clyburn. Labor.”

CNN reported in July 2024 that Obama and former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi spoke about what to do following Biden’s debate crash. The relationship between the two presidents and former partners suffered from that moment.

Biden doesn’t directly address Obama’s involvement before he dropped out. But he notes that Obama was widely criticized by Democrats after his lackluster first debate in 2012 with Mitt Romney, that year’s Republican nominee. He also says his subsequent vice presidential debate performance proved important since “Barack had a terrible first debate against Mitt Romney. We needed to stop the bleeding. Which I did. Barack called me that night before I took off on Air Force Two to say, ‘Thanks, you saved me.’”

Biden does write about Sen. Chuck Schumer, writing that when the Senate Democratic leader came to see him at his Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, home in mid-July to suggest he drop out, “I told Schumer he had a lot of gumption (I may have said it differently at the time), coming to my home and telling me to get out of the race. Loyalty matters to me.”

He also addressed his conversations with Pelosi.

“She told me that I wasn’t getting an honest assessment of where the race stood. She was blunt: There were no polls that said I had any chance to win,” Biden said.

He was furious then, and the two old friends did not speak for months.

However, according to a person familiar with the conversation, they spoke when both at the funeral of Tatiana Schlossberg in January, and had a one-on-one lunch a few weeks later.

Biden writes elsewhere in the book that life is too short for holding grudges.

Now, the person says, with Pelosi’s own time in Congress finishing in January, the two committed Catholics are discussing a possible trip together to the Vatican.