Hillary Clinton has told the BBC that Joe Biden “did the right thing” by standing aside in the US presidential election after his stumbling debate performance against Donald Trump earlier this year.
“I was with him a week before that disastrous debate and I saw no reason why he should have stepped down,” the former first lady said in an interview with BBC Radio 4’s Today programme.
“But once that debate happened, he could not recover and he did the right thing,” she said.
Clinton, who ran unsuccessfully for president against Trump in 2016, said she believed “the future of democracy is at stake” in November’s election which polls suggest is extremely tight.
She has thrown her full support behind Kamala Harris, who replaced President Biden as the Democratic candidate, calling on her to “defeat Donald Trump to break the fever that he has caused in our political system”.
“The two candidates have presented extremely different agendas for where they want to take our country,” Clinton told Today presenter Amol Rajan in the BBC interview.
The election, she said, would have repercussions far beyond the US including “whether or not we continue supporting Ukraine, whether we can get some kind of workable resolution in the Middle East and so much else”.
Trump has previously indicated that he would cut US aid for Ukraine. After meeting Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in New York on Friday, the former US president said he had “a very good relationship” with both Zelensky and his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin.
“We both want to see a fair deal made,” Trump said. The war, he added, “should stop and the president (Zelensky) wants it to stop, and I’m sure President Putin wants it to stop and that’s a good combination.”
Clinton, who served as secretary of state in the Obama administration from 2009 to 2013, also criticised Trump’s promise to begin a mass deportation of illegal immigrants if elected.
“Let’s start with one million,” his vice-presidential pick JD Vance said of the plan in August. “That’s where Kamala Harris has failed. And then we can go from there.”
“He is going to have a military presence [in US cities] to achieve his goals,” Clinton said on Monday. “If you look a certain way, if you talk a certain way, you will be subject to these Draconian measures.”
When asked what drives Trump’s support, she told the BBC that “people support him for different reasons” including feeling “overlooked” and “unseen” or that the “economy doesn’t work for them”.
“I think our problem is frankly we are not the most effective messengers,” she said of the Democratic Party. “About what we see and what we’re trying to do to address these real and legitimate concerns that people have. I recognise and accept my share of the responsibility.”
“It is hard in a time when politicians are expected to be more entertaining, where social media demands that you be outrageous, that you say something that breaks through, to do the hard, boring work of actually getting things done,” Clinton said.
Asked whether she felt Biden should have withdrawn from the race earlier than he did in July, she strongly rejected the suggestion.
But she said she thought Harris had “performed flawlessly” since then.
The election will be held on 5 November and the new president will take office in January.
Polls are currently very tight in the seven states considered as crucial in the contest, with just one or two percentage points separating the two candidates.
Clinton, 76, was the first woman nominee for president from a major political party when she ran against Trump in 2016. Her husband, Bill Clinton, who she married in 1975, was president from 1993 until 2001.
She is currently promoting a new memoir, a collection of essays called “Something Lost, Something Gained: Reflections on Life, Love and Liberty”.
