Former Vice President Joe Biden said Friday that if he doesn’t run for president in 2020, he doesn’t want it to be because he’s afraid of losing.
Biden said “the jury’s still out” on whether he will launch a Democratic bid for the White House against the sitting Republican president.
“Honest to God I don’t know,” he said when asked by a reporter at Southern Connecticut State University on Friday, as reported by the Hartford Courant.
“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,” he said. “And so the jury’s still out.”
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Biden has previously said he would only run for the Democratic nomination if he didn’t think anyone else in the party was up to the challenge.
While Biden, who would be 77 by the time of the 2020 elections, had planned to run in 2016 following his stint in the White House under former President Obama, he postponed the plans when his eldest son Beau Biden became ill with terminal cancer.
“I had planned on running for president,” Biden said. “But then my son, my soul, Beau, was diagnosed after he came home from having volunteered to go to Iraq for a year. … He got a diagnosis which was essentially a death sentence. … I knew I couldn’t run,” he said.
Biden’s remarks come after a Twitter spat with President Trump earlier this week. Biden said at a rally that in high school he would have taken Trump “behind the gym and beat the hell out of him” over his lewd comments about women. He later said he shouldn’t have made the comment.