Former Democratic Vice President Joe Biden said Tuesday he was not running for president in 2020 and Democrats should give President Donald Trump the wall to save DACA because "I don't care about his political victory."
"If you had a wall that provided security that wasn't an absolute waste of money — meaning national security and the technical means to protect it, and all these kids had a path to citizenship — I'd be inclined to do that," Biden, 75, told Chris Cuomo on CNN.
"You'd give Trump the political victory in order to get the deal done?" Cuomo asked.
"I don't care about his political victory," Biden responded. "That's not how I view politics, whether or not it's a personal victory or not."
Nearly 700,000 young aliens are affected by the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program that is scheduled to expire March 5.
Democrats have insisted a permanent fix for DACA be part of any legislation to finance the government — and a stalemate over the issue in the Senate last month led to a two-day government shutdown.
The House passed a temporary spending bill Tuesday to keep the government open until March 23 and fund the Defense Department through September — and President Trump earlier called for another shutdown if Congress could not reach a deal to strengthen the nation's borders.
Biden, who retired in January after more than four decades on Capitol Hill, including 36 years in Congress and two terms in the White House, said the only thing Democrats needed to remain firm on in the DACA debate is preventing Trump from using the young illegals as "a bargaining chip."
"The American people overwhelmingly think the lives of these kids shouldn't be bargained for anything," he told Cuomo. "Just do it.
"Either do it or don't do it, but don't bargain their lives for a wall or for funding for a program.
"That is not the American way."
On 2020, Biden said he was devoting his time to electing more Democrats to Congress, and possibly even the White House, because "the American people are better than their leadership is now across the board.
"We just have to give them a chance.
"You give them a chance, they've never let the country down.
"I spend all my time seeing that we elect a Democratic House to stop this insanity and begin to right this ship again.
"That's what I'm focused on — and I really mean that," Biden said. "We've got a lot of talented people in the Democratic Party, and I'm looking for some of these guys to come along."
He did attack President Trump for creating a "dangerous notion of nationalism" and a "phony populism" that "just is creating space for people to grab power."
"We are abdicating our responsibility around the world and putting everything in terms of 'us versus them,'" Biden told Cuomo before defining the populism issue as "the only reason you have a problem is because of the other.
"It's because of that immigrant or that minority or because of someone else doing something to you.
"This president has spent his entire time since he's gotten in office trying to divide the country instead of uniting the country."
President Trump also is working hard to roll back the legacy of former President Barack Obama, Biden said.
"All he seems to be doing is trying to undo everything that president Obama has done," he told Cuomo. "But he's not able to do that by the way?
"He's damaged healthcare, but it's not gone," Biden explained.
"He has gone after the Paris accord, but you see mayors and governors and local leaders getting together and making sure it doesn't have the effect that he intended it to be.
"He can't undo it all. He's hurting it. He's slowing the process.
"But most of all," Biden said, "we're missing an enormous opportunity, an enormous opportunity to change the life for middle-class people."