OAN Staff Blake Wolf
3:06 PM – Thursday, October 30, 2025
Former Vice President Kamala Harris recently suggested that President Joe Biden “didn’t want” to debate Donald Trump and had to be “talked into it,” a decision that culminated in his disastrous June 2024 debate performance.
In a Thursday “Diary of a CEO” podcast appearance with host Steven Bartlett, Harris was pressed on Biden’s mental state leading up to his summer debate performance against Trump in 2024.
“He called me from debate camp. The president did, Biden did. And I could tell something was a little off,” Harris recounted. “And I was concerned about… I don’t think he wanted to debate is my point. He didn’t want that debate.”
Bartlett went on to state that “it was so apparently clear” to everyone that Biden was “not OK” during the June 2024 debate against President Trump, while questioning why the Democrat leadership structure was “pretending everything was okay.”
“You know, it’s like any competition you go in, whether it’s you’re bidding for something, if it’s sports, you got to want it,” she responded. “If you don’t want to be in the competition, it will absolutely have an impact on your performance. And I don’t think he, I’m pretty sure he did not want to debate.”
Advertisement“We had conversations about it. I think he got talked into it,” Harris continued. “You know, in every debate, I don’t care who you are, there will be statistics wrong or, you know, you name this country, but it was that country. That always happens. There is no such thing as a perfect debate. So there will be something to clean up. And I expect that. And then, you know, we saw what we all saw.”
Biden’s disastrous debate performance was the catalyst for legacy media and Democrat leaders to finally recognize what was obviously apparent to millions of Americans — Biden was clearly unfit to serve as the president due to the steep decline in his mental state.
Additionally, in the interview with Harris, Bartlett brought up a revelation she made in her memoir “107 Days,” in which she sharply criticized leaders in the Biden White House for “adding fuel to negative narratives that sprung up about me.”
In her book, Harris stated that Biden’s “inner circle seemed fine” with allowing damaging narratives about Harris to take root without batting them down, going so far as to claim that “it seemed as if they decided I should be knocked down a little bit more.”
“Did he, Joe Biden, know that that was happening?” Bartlett asked.
“I don’t know if he did, but it’s the staff underneath him that are in charge of that,” Harris responded, prompting Bartlett to ask whether the Biden White House wanted Harris “to be weaker in public perceptions because that kind of keeps you in your place?”
“I think that was part of it,” she continued. “I do, I think that they decided that, you know, there are far too many people in this world and in professional life who approach things with a zero-sum game.”
“I have a great deal of affection for [Biden]. And there were times that I’ve been quite candid about where he greatly disappointed me, and frankly, you know, angered me,” Harris added.
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