Biden was right to stand aside, said the candidate

Hillary Clinton told the BBC that Joe Biden was right to stand aside in the US presidential election after his poor confrontation with Donald Trump earlier this year.

“When that argument happened, he never recovered and did the right thing,” he told Radio 4’s Today.

He also said that Democrats have not succeeded in telling Trump’s supporters what to do to fix their economic problems.

In 2016, the former US secretary of state was suddenly defeated by Trump, who is now facing Democrat Kamala Harris in the November election, which is said to be very tight.

He said he saw Joe Biden one week before the debate and saw no reason why he should step down but everything changed.

Clinton also said the future of democracy is at stake in this election and asked Harris to “defeat Donald Trump to break the fever he has caused in our political system”.

“These two candidates have presented a very different agenda of where they want to take our country,” Clinton said in a BBC interview, which came as she was promoting her new biography.

Trump dismissed the idea that he was dangerous and said the real threat came from the Democratic Party.

The election, Clinton said, will have far-reaching consequences for the US including “whether we continue to support Ukraine, or whether we can find some kind of effective solution in the Middle East and much more”.

Trump has indicated that he will cut off US aid to Ukraine. After meeting Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in New York on Friday, the former US president said he has a “very good relationship” with Zelensky and his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin.

“We both want to see a fair deal,” Trump said. The war, he added, “must stop and the president (Zelensky) wants it to stop, and I’m sure President Putin wants it to stop and that’s a good combination.”

Clinton, who served as secretary of state in the Obama administration from 2009 to 2013, also criticized Trump’s promise to begin deporting illegal immigrants if elected.

“Let’s start with a million,” his vice president JD Vance said of the plan in August. “This is where Kamala Harris failed. Then we can go from there.”

“He will be there in the military [in US cities] to achieve his goals,” Clinton said Monday. “If you look a certain way, if you talk a certain way, you’re going to face these Draconian measures.”

When asked what drives Trump’s support, he told the BBC that “people support him for different reasons” including feeling “neglected” and “invisible” or that “the economy is not working for them”.

“I think our problem is that we are not very effective delegates,” he said of the Democratic Party. “About what we’re seeing and what we’re trying to do to address these very real and legitimate concerns that people have. I recognize and accept my share of responsibility.”

“It’s hard in an age where politicians are expected to be very entertaining, when social media wants you to be angry, to say something offensive, to do the hard, boring work of actually doing things,” Clinton said.

Asked if he thought Biden should have dropped out of the race before he dropped out in July, he flatly rejected the suggestion.

But he said he thinks Harris has “performed flawlessly” since then.

Elections will be held on November 5 and the new president will take office in January.

Polls are currently tight in the seven states considered key to the contest, with just one or two percentage points separating the two candidates.

Clinton, 76, is the first woman to be nominated for president by a major political party when she ran against Trump in 2016. Her husband, Bill Clinton, whom she married in 1975, was president from 1993 to 2001.