Six months after his party lost the presidential election, former President Joseph R. Biden Jr. is stepping back into the public spotlight with a scathing condemnation of his successor and his handling of international affairs.
In his first broadcast interview since leaving the White House, Mr. Biden attacked President Trump’s management of the war in Ukraine and his dealings with global allies. Speaking to the BBC, Mr. Biden also defended the timing of his own withdrawal from the 2024 presidential campaign.
The former president singled out some of Mr. Trump’s actions on foreign policy — including his combative meeting in the Oval Office in February with President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine.
“I found it sort of beneath America in the way that it took place,” Mr. Biden said of the meeting. He also pointed to calls by Mr. Trump to rename the Gulf of Mexico, take back the Panama Canal and acquire Greenland.
“What the hell’s going on here? What president ever talks like that? That’s not who we are,” Mr. Biden said. “We’re about freedom, democracy, opportunity — not about confiscation.”
While he did not mention Mr. Trump by name, his comments were a striking departure from a long tradition in which former presidents decline to criticize the leaders who follow. The attack suggested that Mr. Biden, 82, sees himself as continuing to have a public role in his party, even as many Democrats blame him for their 2024 defeat and want to focus on a new generation of leaders.
While many Democrats consider it politically damaging to focus too much on their last president, Mr. Biden appears inclined to defend his record and to try to shape his legacy.
In his halting speaking style, Mr. Biden boasted of being “so successful on our agenda.” He again defended his decision to seek re-election last year despite polling that, even before he began his campaign, showed that many Democrats did not want him to run for a second term.
“I don’t think it would have mattered,” he said when asked whether he thought he should have quit before his disastrous debate performance in June. “I don’t think that would have made much difference.”
The interview is part of a public re-emergence by Mr. Biden, who has kept a relatively low profile since leaving the White House in January. In recent weeks, he has been spotted at the opening of “Othello,” a popular Broadway show, and at the Vatican for the funeral of Pope Francis.
On Thursday, Mr. Biden is scheduled to appear on ABC’s “The View” for another interview, where he is again expected to be asked about Mr. Trump and to defend his own record as president.
Mr. Biden routinely avoided engaging with the news media as both candidate and president, with his staff members going to great lengths to keep him away from reporters. He chose a British outlet to make his post-presidential news media debut followed by a daytime talk show, continuing his tradition of eschewing the traditional American press.
Three weeks ago, he gave a speech to disability advocates in Chicago in which he accused the current administration of “taking a hatchet” to the Social Security Administration and slammed Mr. Trump as doing “damage and destruction” to the benefits program.
In addition to expressing his displeasure at Mr. Trump’s leadership, Mr. Biden may also be raising his profile for financial gain.
His speech in Chicago was paid and, according to two people familiar with the matter, he is expected to participate in more speaking engagements in the future. He is also working on a memoir about his time in office and has re-signed with Creative Artists Agency, which represented him from 2017 to 2020.
His family’s post-presidential costs have increased since Mr. Trump took office. While Mr. Biden and his wife, Jill Biden, have Secret Service protection for the rest of their lives, Mr. Trump moved in March to revoke protection for their adult children, including Hunter Biden.
As Democrats search for a path forward, they are unlikely to welcome Mr. Biden’s reminders about the past.
David Axelrod, an early critic of Mr. Biden’s running for a second term, said Mr. Biden’s raised public profile could have the opposite effect of what the former president may intend.
“It’s understandable that President Biden wants to speak, given all that has transpired since January 20th,” said Mr. Axelrod, a former adviser to President Barack Obama. “But it’s likely the only person more eager for him to re-emerge is Donald Trump, who brings Biden up seven days a week and twice on Sunday.”
For years, Mr. Biden and his aides argued that he was the only Democrat who could defeat Mr. Trump — despite the party’s deep bench of governors, senators and other younger officials. By insisting on seeking re-election, then abruptly bowing out under pressure from his own party, Mr. Biden left Democrats scrambling to remake a billion-dollar presidential campaign for a different candidate over 107 days.
Former Vice President Kamala Harris, who replaced him on the ticket, has told friends that she would have beaten Mr. Trump if she had been given more time to campaign — the implication being that Mr. Biden should have quit the race earlier.
Other Democrats argue that if Mr. Biden had acknowledged the signs of his aging earlier and declined to run for re-election, their party could have hosted a robust primary race and emerged with a stronger contender to challenge Mr. Trump.
Mr. Biden, who hinted during his 2020 campaign that he would serve only one term, said in the BBC interview that he had been prepared to hand over leadership to the next generation instead of running again. “But things moved so quickly that it made it difficult to walk away,” he said, adding, “it was just a difficult decision.”
Some of his most loyal aides have insisted that Democrats have only themselves to blame for their loss. Mike Donilon, a longtime adviser, has continued to argue that Mr. Biden was the party’s best chance for keeping the White House.
“Lots of people have terrible debates,” Mr. Donilon told an audience at Harvard University in February. “Usually, the party doesn’t lose its mind. But that’s what happened — it just melted down.”
In the BBC interview, Mr. Biden said he was worried about the future of global democracy if allies no longer saw the United States as a reliable leader. He noted that Sweden and Finland had both joined NATO during his presidency, bolstering the alliance. “And in four years we’ve got a guy who wants to walk away from it all,” Mr. Biden said.
“I’m worried that Europe is going to lose confidence in the certainty of America, and the leadership of America in the world,” he said.
The possibility that the NATO alliance might be dying is a “grave concern,” he said.
“We’re the only nation in position to have the capacity to bring people together to lead the world,” he said “Otherwise you’re going to have China and the former Soviet Union, Russia, stepping up.”
If NATO did not exist, Mr. Biden asked at one point, “do you think Putin would have stopped at Ukraine?” He added, apparently referring to Trump administration officials, “I don’t understand how they fail to understand that there is strength in alliances.”
In his second term, Mr. Trump has often singled out his predecessor for blame — a New York Times analysis found that he publicly mentioned Mr. Biden’s name more than six times a day on average in his first 50 days in office.
Asked whether Mr. Trump was behaving more like a monarch than a president, Mr. Biden put it carefully: “He’s not behaving like a Republican president.”