Politics

Biden Looks At Himself In Mirrors To Decide If He Wants To Run For President

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Former Vice President Joe Biden is still deciding whether or not he wants to challenge President Donald Trump in the 2020 elections, but he hasn’t ruled out the possibility.

After a week trading schoolyard jabs that he’d like to physically fight the president, Biden said “the jury is still out” on an electoral matchup.

“Honest to God I don’t know,” Biden said in a public discussion Friday at Southern Connecticut State University when asked about 2020. “I have to be able to stand in front of a mirror and look in the mirror and know that if I don’t run it’s not because I’m afraid of losing, it’s not because I don’t want to take on the responsibility, it’s because there’s somebody better to do it and, or because emotionally I’m not positioned to be all in. And so the jury’s still out,” Biden said.

Biden has previously stated that he would run if he thought he had the best chance of beating Trump after the first term, even though he would be 78 years old — four years older than Trump — on his first day as president, if elected. That would make Biden the oldest president ever elected, beating Trump himself who took office at age 70.

Biden said he wanted to run for president in 2016, but his son Beau’s fight with brain cancer and tragic death in May 2015 prevented him. “I had planned on running for president. But then my son, my soul, Beau, was diagnosed after he came home from having volunteered to go to Iraq for a year,” Biden said. “He got a diagnosis which was essentially a death sentence.”

“I knew I couldn’t run,” Biden said. He has frequently commented that he regrets not running in 2016.

After Biden quipped Tuesday that he would rather fight Trump behind the gym than debate him, Trump responded in a tweet that Biden was “weak, both mentally and physically,” and “would go down fast and hard, crying all the way” if the pair came to blows.

“I shouldn’t have brought it up again,” Biden said Friday in an interview with liberal podcast Pod Save America. “Because I don’t want to get in the mosh pit with this guy.”

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