Biden says it was his ‘obligation to the country’ to drop out of presidential race

Joe Biden has said it was his "obligation to the country" to drop out of the 2024 presidential election and prevent what he said would be "a genuine danger to American security" if Donald Trump won a second term of office.

The US president gave his reasoning for stepping aside in at-times an emotional interview with CBS News on Sunday, his first since quitting the race in July. He explained that losing the confidence of senior House and Senate Democrats, who feared his unpopularity would hurt them at the polls in November, had weighed on his mind.

Ultimately, Biden said, it was a combination of circumstances that led him to make his momentous decision not to seek re-election, which subsequently saw Vice-President Kamala Harris taking over the Democratic ticket and catching or surpassing Trump in several battleground states, according to new polling data.

"Although I have the great honor to be president, I think I have an obligation to the country to do the most important thing you can do, and that is we must, we must, we must defeat Trump," he said.

Biden said he did not take the decision lightly, and made it in consultation with his family at home in Delaware. At the time, he said, he still believed he could win in November, but events had "moved quickly" after weeks of pressure and growing unease inside his party that, at 81, he was too old for the rigors of a second term.

Those fears were heightened by his disastrous debate performance against Trump in June. "I had a really bad day in that debate because I was sick. But I have no serious problem," Biden said, denying he was impaired by any cognitive issue.

"The polls we had showed that it was a neck and neck race, it would have been down to the wire. 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.