CNN host John Berman apologized after he caught himself cringing at a clip of former President Joe Biden defending his decision not to drop out of the 2024 race sooner.
Asked whether he wished he exited the race earlier to allow a different Democratic nominee more time to run, Biden had a blunt answer for his BBC interviewer: “Well, uh, I don’t think it would have... mattered.”
Cutting from the clip back to Berman, CNN’s cameras showed the anchor with an unmistakable wincing look on his face. Berman quickly realized it too.
“Um, I‘m sorry. I shouldn’t have had that face there,” he said. “It may be the way he answered that question that answered that question.”
Commentator Alyssa Farah Griffin didn’t draw any additional attention to Berman’s flub, launching into her analysis of how Biden’s decision affected eventual Democratic nominee Kamala Harris’ losing campaign.
“Listen, Kamala Harris had a 90-day stretch to run, by the way, at a time when... only 28 percent of Americans thought that the country was on the right track,” said Farah Griffin, who is also a co-host of The View. “You could be the greatest political candidate of all time—which the former vice president was not—and you‘re not going to be able to overcome that way that you‘re just carried down by the Biden administration.”
Biden stayed in the presidential race until a brutal June debate against Donald Trump. After Harris’ loss to Trump in November, Biden became a common target for blame—in part due to his late exit.
However, the one-term president has repeatedly defended the decision, as he did in his first post-presidency interview, which was aired by the BBC on Wednesday.
“What we had set out to do, no-one thought we could do,” Biden said. “And we had become so successful in our agenda, it was hard to say, ‘No, I’m going to stop now’... It was a hard decision.”
Even when pressed on the move, he wouldn’t admit that he felt any regret.
“No, I think it was the right decision,” Biden said, before pausing. “I think that… Well, it was just a difficult decision.”
