Former President Bill Clinton urged the public to stop focusing on the Biden administration and former President Joe Biden’s cognitive decline, suggesting they look to “the future” instead.

Clinton is among the Democratic figures who have defended Biden’s leadership following scrutiny about the former leader’s cognitive abilities while in office. The 42nd president explained that Biden was “on top of his brief” whenever he was around him, and suggested the president’s duties leading up to the first presidential debate may have affected his performance.

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“What happened in the 10 days before his debate, and what were the White House staff thinking?” Clinton said on ABC News’s The View on Thursday. “He went to Europe and back twice, and then he went to California once. And he was 80 years old, what the heck is he doing that for? So why was that allowed to happen? So there’s a lot of questions I don’t know. All I know is I think we should think less about that and more about the future.”

Clinton then pointed to previous presidents who have had health troubles, including former President Ronald Reagan’s Alzheimer’s diagnosis in 1994 and former President Woodrow Wilson’s stroke in 1919. 

When asked about the nation’s future, Clinton suggested that the United States would experience a “hallelujah moment” if the Democratic Party wins back the White House in the 2028 election. He also predicted that the Supreme Court could “rediscover the Constitution,” and he would be “happy” if this happened.

Biden’s cognitive decline has been a major point of focus for the current administration, in which President Donald Trump has specifically criticized the last administration’s use of Biden’s autopen. He backed an expanded Department of Justice investigation into the legality of Biden’s autopen use, claiming “radical Left lunatics” were using it in the former president’s name.

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Biden, however, has pushed back against Trump’s comments, telling the Washington Examiner, “I made the decisions during my presidency,” including his enactment of pardons, executive orders, and legislation. He then called Trump’s claims “ridiculous and false.”

In 2024, Biden denied declaring Easter Sunday as Transgender Day of Visibility, telling reporters, “I didn’t do that,” and that House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) was “thoroughly uninformed” over his accusation that the president betrayed the “central tenet of Easter.” Biden’s denial drew scrutiny from Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL), who questioned whether “a bunch of woke, 20-something-year-old White House staffers” were leading the White House.