In his first interview since dropping out of the 2024 presidential race, President Joe Biden said he had concluded that staying in the race would be a “real distraction,” citing comments from Democratic leaders on Capitol Hill who feared he would poach other candidates.

In an interview with Robert Costa on CBS Sunday Morning, Biden said the presidential race "was supposed to be down to the last minute, but what happened was that a number of my Democratic colleagues in the House and the Senate thought I would hurt them in the race, and I was concerned that if I stayed in the race, that would be the topic you'd be interviewing me about. 'Why did Nancy Pelosi say…? Why did somebody do that?' And I thought it would be a real distraction."

Biden added that when he ran for office in 2020, "I saw myself as a transitional president. I can't even tell you how old I am. It's hard for me to get it out of my mouth, but things were moving so fast that it didn't happen. And the combination was that I thought there was a critical issue for me — it's still no joke — upholding this democracy, but I thought it was important. Because while it's a great honor to be president, I think I have an obligation to the country to … do the most important thing we can do, and that is, we must, we must, we must defeat Trump."

Pelosi has said she has not spoken to Biden since he dropped out of the race last month, but she has insisted she would not call anyone to orchestrate an effort to force Biden out of the race. She told the New Yorker: "I never called anybody, but people called me to say there was a challenge. So there had to be a change in the leadership of the campaign, or what would come next."