Donald Trump’s presidency will 'go down as the single exception in American history', says Joe Biden

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Donald Trump’s failure to maintain presidential standards will “God willing, go down as the single exception in American history”, former Vice President Joe Biden has said.

If it wasn’t for 74,500 votes, “we’d have a good president," he told The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. "We’d have a president who understands the role of the presidency.”

Mr Biden said he had initially been prepared to give Mr Trump a chance.

But he said the turning point had come when Mr Trump refused to denounce far right protesters after violence erupted in the Virginian city of Charlottesville in August.

Refusing to denounce white supremacy explicitly, the US leader instead condemned the “violence on many sides”.

“The idea you would see in America in a historic city, Nazis carrying flags, spouting the same exact bile about Jews that was spouted in Germany in the 30s, and to not have an outright flat condemnation of that is… I found it reprehensible," Mr Biden said.

"So I couldn’t remain silent anymore.”

Although Mr Trump has “never called him” on the phone since he took up office, Mr Biden said he had given advice to his successor, Mike Pence.

He had counselled the Vice President “on a number of issues” after he took office in January, Mr Biden said.

“I spent a lot of time dealing with foreign policy and I had responsibility for certain chunks of the world and I’ve let him know in a security setting what I thought they should look out for and what I thought the landmines were," he added.

Mr Biden also refused to rule out whether he will run in the 2020 presidential election.

But he said that there was a new generation of Democrats entering politics who have had enough of division, and indicated that we might not have yet heard of the 2020 Democratic candidate.