US President Joe Biden on Thursday warned against the dangerous erosion of the fundamental guardrails protecting an increasingly “fragile” US democracy.
A day after urging Americans to stand firm against an “oligarchy” forming under US president-elect Donald Trump, Biden highlighted the specific threat posed by a cowed Supreme Court and Congress unable to keep an autocratic presidency in check.
Biden, in a recorded interview with MSNBC — his last before leaving office on Monday — also revealed details of his conversations with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and discussed the situation in Ukraine.
Photo: EPA-EFE
“I really am concerned about how fragile democracy is,” Biden said. “I really think we’re in an inflection point in history here where, unrelated to any particular leader, things are going to change drastically.”
“So I guess what I’m worried about is that the thing that keeps it on track are the guardrails, that there’s a Supreme Court that’s independent [and a Congress where you] speak your mind, but you’re held accountable to basic standards,” he said.
The president might be the “top dog,” but “you can’t dictate everything,” he added.
Biden said he did not have any recent discussions with Trump about the negotiations that led to the Gaza ceasefire deal, for which the incoming president has sought to take credit.
As for Netanyahu, Biden said he still considers him a “friend,” although “we don’t agree on a whole lot lately.”
Biden recounted one of his early conversations with Netanyahu after the attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, by Hamas.
“I told them we were going to help, but Bibi, I said, you can’t be carpet-bombing in these communities,” he said.
“And he said to me: ‘Well you did it... You carpet-bombed Berlin. You dropped a nuclear weapon. You killed thousands of people because you had to in order to win a war,’” Biden recounted.
Biden said he also kept reminding Netanyahu “that he has to find a way to accommodate the legitimate concerns of a large group of people called Palestinians who have no place to live independently.”
Touching on the conflict in Ukraine, Biden said Russia has suffered more than 670,000 wounded or dead since the invasion.
“They’re losing big time, too,” he said. “It doesn’t mean they’re going to lose everything, but it means they’re not going to be able to have the kind of win [Russian President Vladimir Putin] thought,” he said.
Putin wants to “re-establish the old Warsaw Pact,” Biden said. “I can’t let that happen.”
Biden also said he was not concerned about his safety when he visited Ukraine.
The US Secret Service was “very unhappy,” he said, “but I didn’t think that Putin would dare to take out an American president.”
Biden, who dropped his re-election bid after a disastrous debate against Trump, also reflected briefly on his political failings.
“Ironically, I almost spent too much time on the policy and not enough time on the politics,” he said.
The hour-long sit-down interview with MSNBC was one of just a handful Biden gave to the media during his four years as president.
He also rarely held full-fledged news conferences, and his White House had an occasionally tense relationship with the press, which it accused of unfairly focusing on the 82-year-old president’s age and cognitive abilities.
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