President Biden Asked Point Blank If He's Considered His Legacy Amid Calls For Him To Drop Out

5 months ago

At a press briefing on Thursday, President Biden was asked about Democrats calling on him to drop out.

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Transcript

00:00I'm sorry, Nancy Cordes, CBS.

00:06Thank you, Mr. President.

00:07You mentioned other instances in history where presidents have faced a challenge, but what

00:12makes this moment in history so unique is that it is not your enemies who are calling

00:17on you to reconsider your decision to stay in the race.

00:20It's your friends, supporters, people who think you've done a great job over the past

00:25four years.

00:26Have you spent time thinking about what it would mean for your legacy, which you've worked

00:31decades to build, if you stay in the race despite the concerns that voters say they

00:36have and you lose to someone who you yourself have argued is unfit to return to the Oval

00:42Office?

00:43Well, look, I'm not in this for my legacy.

00:50I'm in this to complete the job I started.

00:53As you recall, understandably, many of you and many economists thought my initial initiatives

01:00that I put forward can't do that.

01:02It's going to cause inflation.

01:03Things are going to skyrocket.

01:04The debt's going to go up.

01:07What are you hearing now from mainstream economists?

01:10Sixteen economic Nobel laureates said I've done a hell of a job and under my plans so

01:18far and what's going to happen in the future if I've reelected, that things are going to

01:23get much better.

01:25Our economy is growing.

01:26I was determined when I got elected to stop the trickle-down economic theory that if the

01:32wealthy did very well, everybody else would do well.

01:36My dad was a well-read, decent guy.

01:38I don't remember much trickling down on his kitchen table.

01:42Middle-class people and working-class people need help.

01:47What happened is I decided to implement, was able to implement as president, what I believed

01:52when I was a senator and that is that the way to build this economy is from the middle

01:57out and the bottom up.

01:59That way we grow the economy and the wealthy still do very well.

02:04They do fine.

02:06Guess what?

02:07Find me an economist, a mainstream economist, who said we haven't done well.

02:11What have we not done that isn't working right now?

02:15We got more to do, though.

02:16We got to finish the job.

02:18And by the way, I come from the corporate state of the world.

02:21Delaware has more corporations, you know, registered in Delaware than every other state

02:26in the nation combined.

02:28I'm not anti-corporate, but corporate profits have doubled since the pandemic, doubled.

02:34It's time things get back in order a little bit.

02:37It's time, for example, if I'm reelected, we're going to make sure that rents are kept

02:43at 5 percent increase, corporate rents for apartments and the like and homes are limited

02:49to 5 percent.

02:50We're going to make a lot of changes that I've been talking about because we're going

02:54to continue to grow this economy.

02:56And by the way, I know, remember how I got so roundly criticized for being so pro-union,

03:02not labor, union, union.

03:04Well, guess what?

03:06I've been the most pro-union labor president in history.

03:10Not a joke.

03:11And guess what?

03:12We had the Treasury Department do a study.

03:15When unions do better, everybody does better.

03:20Everybody does better.

03:21And we talk about how, for example, and when I went, remember when we talked about getting

03:27the computer chip industry back in the United States, used to be 40 percent of the industry.

03:32We invented the chip, 40 percent of the industry was in the United States.

03:36And former presidents decided that the best way to do it is find the cheapest labor in

03:40the world, send the product over there and import what the product was.

03:45And so what did I do?

03:47I was told not to go over to Europe, I mean to Asia, including Europe, but Asia.

03:53I remember going to South Korea, convincing them to invest $20 billion in the United States

04:00to build computer chip factories.

04:03And I asked why when they finally decided to do it.

04:06And the answer was because you have the safest economy in the world and you have the best

04:11workers in the world.

04:13So the whole idea here is we've invested, there's over $50 billion in investment in

04:20computer chip manufacturing just coming into being.

04:24None of you thought that would happen.

04:26None of you thought that would happen, but it's happening.

04:29It's happening.

04:30And it's going to grow economies all through.

04:33And by the way, red states and blue states, manufacturers as much in red states and blue

04:38states, I've made no distinction.

04:40So my generic point is that the idea that we can't continue to build and grow the economy,

04:49make it fairer.

04:50And like I said, from my standpoint, when the middle class does well, that's when the

04:58whole economy grows.

04:59The poorer of a shot, the wealthy do well, but they wealthy guys start paying their taxes.

President Biden Asked Point Blank If He's Considered His Legacy Amid Calls For Him To Drop Out

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