Joe Biden claimed it took him so long to bow out of the 2024 presidential race because he was being ‘successful’ in office.

Implying that Kamala Harris would have lost anyway, the 82-year-old former president also said that there would have been no difference if he had withdrawn sooner.

Biden whispered, mumbled, coughed, and paused for long moments as he conducted his first broadcast interview since leaving office. 

When asked why he did not end his 2024 campaign earlier, he told BBC Radio 4’s Today program: ‘I don’t think it would have mattered.’ 

Much of Biden’s presidency was overshadowed by questions about his cognitive state. After a disastrous debate against Donald Trump on June 27 last year he took nearly a month to finally end his reelection bid, finally calling time on July 21.

That gave Harris just 106 days to build-out a presidential campaign, and she ultimately lost to Trump in November.

‘It’s a question lots of people ask you, Mr. President – did you leave it too late? Should you have withdrawn earlier, given someone else a bigger chance?’ BBC journalist Nick Robinson asked.

‘We left at a time when we had a good candidate,’ Biden said of Harris in the interview that aired Wednesday morning. ‘She was fully funded.’ 

‘And what happened was, what we had set out to do, no one thought we could do,’ the former president added. ‘We had become so successful in our agenda, it was hard to say, ‘I’m gonna stop now.”

The eleventh-hour decision has been widely criticized by Democrats who felt that if Biden had given into the pressure earlier it could have made a difference to the 2024 election outcome.

Biden told the BBC that when he was elected in 2020 he had initially intended to serve only one term.

The former president said he wanted to be a transitional figure for the future of the Democratic Party after defeating Trump in 2020.

‘I meant what I said when I started, that I’m preparing to hand this to the next generation…but things moved so quickly, and it made it difficult to walk away,’ he admitted.

Biden’s demeanor in the interview was reminiscent of the latter stages of his presidential term, riddled with mumbles, nonsensical rants and long pauses.

He struggled to properly articulate his thoughts, at times speaking in whispers and refused to ever address the current president by his name.

Trump’s communications director Steven Cheung said: ‘Joe Biden is a complete disgrace to this country and the office he occupied.

‘He has clearly lost all mental faculties and his handlers thought it’d be a good idea for him to do an interview and incoherently mumble his way through every answer.’

Cheung added: ‘Sadly, this feels like abuse.’

Biden told USA Today in one of his final interviews before ending his one-term presidency that he thought he could have won in a rematch with Trump if he stayed in the race.

But polling and public sentiment showed a very different story with Biden heading for a landslide loss.

Biden opted for his first post-presidency broadcast interview to be with a foreign outlet.

It was pre-recorded on Monday in the former president’s home town of Wilmington, Delaware. 

The interview was billed as marking the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II in Europe.

In the sit-down Biden lashed out at his Republican successor.

In particular, he lambasted Trump for his comments on taking over Canada, Greenland and the Panama Canal, and renaming the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America.

‘What the hell’s going on here? What president ever talks like that? That’s not who we are,’ the former president said. ‘We’re about freedom, democracy, opportunity, not about confiscation.’

He also voiced worries about U.S. relations with Europe declining after Trump took over.

Biden expressed ‘grave concern’ over the breakdown of post-World War II alliances and called it ‘foolish’ to think Russian President Vladimir Putin would concede the war in Ukraine if parts of the country were given to the Kremlin as part of a peace deal.