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The White House says Biden believes he made the right decision to drop out of the 2024 race

White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said President Biden is convinced he made the right decision to withdraw from the presidential race in July, acknowledging that many election experts are comparing the Democratic Party’s failed efforts with their own Analyzing Opinion on the Race She Dominates Republican President-elect Trump.

Speaking to reporters during a news conference Thursday afternoon, Jean-Pierre said Biden called Trump to congratulate him on his victory and assured Trump he would direct his administration to work with Trump’s team to ensure a peaceful and orderly transition of power.

Additionally, Jean-Pierre said Biden spoke with Vice President Kamala Harris to congratulate her on a “history-inspiring campaign.”

“For some people this election is a time of victory, for others it is a time of loss,” she said. “To state the obvious: Tuesday night’s results were not the result our team wanted. In the coming days, in the coming weeks, even in the coming months, there will be a lot of post-mortem analysis about what happened.”

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White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said Thursday that President Biden believes he did the right thing by dropping out of the presidential race in July. (Fox News)

A reporter asked Jean-Pierre to address criticism of Biden for the loss.

“What I can say, and this is something the president says all the time, ‘He who gets knocked down gets up again,'” Jean-Pierre said, noting that the president had made that exact statement moments before. “The president believes that on behalf of the American people, on behalf of this country, he made the right decision to resign.”

After the 2022 midterm elections, Biden decided to seek re-election, although polls in 2023 showed that about 80% of the American public believed the octogenarian was too old for another term.

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President Joe Biden delivers the annual State of the Union address

President Biden delivers the State of the Union address to a joint session of Congress in the Chamber of the U.S. Capitol in Washington, DC, on March 7. (Shawn Thew Pool/Getty Images)

“What he believed is that 14 million voters in the primaries decided to nominate him and the vice president, obviously she was on the list, the nominee,” Jean-Pierre said when asked again if Biden was the right one made the decision to run for president. “Fourteen million Americans decided this. So they made their decision about who they wanted.”

“As we know, the president decided to resign in July and he … immediately supported the vice president,” she added.

Jean-Pierre was also pressed on whether it was wrong for the 2023 presidential team to strongly encourage the Democratic Party’s rising stars and others participating in the 2020 cycle to rally behind Biden and not think about going for that to run for president.

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Donald Trump

President-elect Trump arrives to speak during an election night event at the Palm Beach Convention Center in West Palm Beach, Florida. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

She declined to get into a specific conversation but said it was not unusual for party members to rally behind their leader, who in this case was Biden.

“What I can say is what the president decided, what the president believed and what the president will continue to do.” [which] “The American people come first,” said Jean-Pierre.

She was also asked whether Biden still stands by his description that Trump poses an existential threat to democracy.

Jean-Pierre said Biden believes what he said then and believes he has an obligation to be honest with Americans.

She backed up her statement by pointing to statements made by former Chief of Staff John Kelly, who called Trump a “fascist.”

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During a series of interviews with the media published in October, Kelly recounted several occasions where the former president allegedly praised Adolf Hitler. Kelly also insisted that Trump fits the “general definition of a fascist” and would rule like a dictator if he were entitled to do so.

Jean-Pierre said Kelly was clear in his statements, but also pointed to statements from Trump about the enemy within who acts against people who disagree with him.

“Look, we are saying it very clearly here,” said Jean-Pierre. “The result was not what we wanted and the Americans made a decision that we want to respect. We want to respect the decision that the American people made, and we will ensure that the American people get what they deserve, which is a peaceful transfer of power.”

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