CHICAGO — Rep. Dean Phillips, the only Democrat running against President Biden in the 2024 Democratic primary, said he would accept an invitation to run in either a Democratic or Republican administration, telling Fox News Digital that he hopes to “help this country in some way.”
Sen. Phillips, D-Minn., spoke to Fox News Digital on the sidelines of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago.
Phillips, a three-term congressman, mounted a tough challenge to Biden in the Democratic primary but suspended her campaign in March.
“I didn’t want to run this campaign. I spent two years trying to call attention to what I saw so clearly with my own eyes,” he said. “I remember my Republican colleagues privately harshly criticizing Donald Trump behind closed doors and then praising him on camera. I watched my Democratic colleagues do the same thing about Joe Biden. I knew Biden was on the decline and would probably lose.”
While Phillips said he “didn’t want to do it,” he told Fox News Digital that it had become “clear that our political culture punishes courage and rewards cowardice and silence.”
“Someone had to do it. In two weeks I put together a campaign to run for president,” he said, “but the message was, be Paul Revere, not George Washington. To really make it happen, I needed someone to hand over the power, like Joe Biden.”
He added: “I’m glad he did, and the rest may be history.”
When asked if he had any desire to run for president again in the future, Phillips said he just wanted to “help this country in some way.”
“This wasn’t to run for president. This was to show people that it’s never too late, that if you feel something is wrong, you should stand up and take action. And I did that,” he said.
“If there’s a way that we can serve our country in a Democratic administration or a Republican administration, wow, we should step up and accept that invitation whenever it comes,” he told Fox News Digital. “So you never know what’s going to happen.”
But Phillips told Fox News Digital that policy matters.
“Americans remember how they feel. They remember how they feel. They want to be excited, they want to be safe, they want to be joyful, they want to be optimistic, and a lot of that is the result of policy,” he said.
“In terms of policy, yes, we have a border crisis. I’ve seen it twice with my own eyes. And as Ronald Reagan said, we have to be a welcoming country,” Phillips said. “We have to be a country with an economy that works for its people. 60 percent of our people live paycheck to paycheck. It doesn’t matter what party you belong to. We’ve let a lot of people down. Our health care system is a mess. This is America.”
But Phillips said politicians needed to stop the infighting.
“As long as we continue to spend all our time fighting, we’ll never have time to come up with better ideas,” he said. “And that’s my call to action to my colleagues in Congress and to the American people: We can’t solve our problems by blaming ourselves.”
