"Freedom" is the first word that Joe Biden utters in the three-minute video with which yesterday he officially announced his candidacy for re-election in the elections of 2024. The president of the United States is running again to "finish the job ” which he started in January 2021. His goal, he says, is to defend personal freedom and civil rights against “MAGA extremists” – the ultras grouped under the slogan “Make America great again” – who “want to cut the Social Security while lowering taxes on the rich," as well as "banning books, dictating the decisions women can make about their bodies, and telling people who they can love."
In the video, Biden combines these admonitions with a reminder of his proverbial confidence in the worth of Americans. "This is no time for complacency", he tells them first, before adding: "I know America, and I know that its people are decent and good. We are still a country that believes in respect and dignified treatment of others, in equal opportunities to succeed", he says.
But perhaps the most important thing about the electoral message is what the president and again candidate does not say explicitly. Because what is clearly and first of all about is to prevent the return of Donald Trump again, who this time he does not quote and only shows fleetingly in a photo between magicians: a striking difference from the video with which he just four years ago years he launched his bid for the 2020 elections, in which he warned: "If we give Trump eight years in the White House, he will forever alter the character of this nation."
Yesterday's election clip is more subtle, more implicitly loaded with social media-style copy of images in which Biden emphasizes his support for the underprivileged, the black population and the LGBTI community, and denounces the storming of the Capitol or the Supreme Court ruling against the right to abortion.
In this sense, Trump is the elephant in the room of the Democratic leader's announcement. And putting an end to Trump is his barely subliminal message under the headline of "finish the job". Because, however much the Republican may have survived the demonstration of his lies and may remain politically alive even after his imputation for bribery and for the crimes that may be attributed to him in the numerous proceedings that continue against him, it seems difficult to imagine that the former president can overcome another electoral failure against the current occupant of the White House, after all his great nemesis.
Biden, obviously, also does not talk about his age in the video: one of the Achilles heels of his candidacy along with his limited popularity ratings. The president will be 82 years old two weeks after election day, on November 5, 2024. If he won, he would reach the end of his term at 86. And these calculations weigh on an electorate of 70% - including more of 50% of Democratic voters – would have preferred another candidate on the progressive side, according to the latest polls. In polls, half of the reluctant population cited the leader's longevity as a key factor against him.
In the election announcement, Biden also does not directly mention his vice president, Kamala Harris, as a candidate to repeat alongside him. But she appears in numerous scenes in the video, which at the end shows a sign with both of their names on it. And just in case there was any doubt, the number two herself confirmed on Twitter that she will repeat on her boss's ticket: another bold decision by the president, given the even lower popularity of Harris (40% approval compared to 42% of the same leader) and his discreet political profile in the two and a half years of his mandate.
In response to Biden's announcement, Donald Trump immediately released a sort of compendium of the tremendous rants and accusations he usually directs against the Democrat while warning voters of the Apocalypse associated with his continuity. "Biden is the most corrupt president of the United States (...) We are like a dumping ground, with cities overrun by millions of illegal immigrants (...), homeless people, drug addicts and violent criminals (...) Thanks to the calamity of Biden's socialist spending, American families are decimated by inflation, banks fail, the dollar collapses”... In short, the closest thing to the end of the world.
But yesterday was not a good day for the former Republican president. Not because of the announcement of his adversary, but because of the beginning, in New York, of the trial of the civil lawsuit that the writer Elizabeth Jean Carro presented against him four months ago for the sexual assault that he allegedly committed subjected in the mid-nineties.
Carroll is accusing Trump of assault and defamation under a new New York state law (the Adult Survivors Act) that allows rape whistleblowers to file civil lawsuits years after the attack. The plaintiff waived at the time to take criminal action.
The trial, which began Tuesday morning with jury selection, comes on top of Trump's recent indictment on 34 counts of forgery related to paying a $130,000 bribe to porn actress Stormy Daniels to buy her silence surrounding an alleged intimate relationship between the two.
The ultra leader could soon be indicted, in addition, for his attempt to falsify the 2020 presidential elections in the state of Georgia, for his role in instigating the assault on the Capitol in January 2021 and for the case of the secret papers that took and hid in his Mar-a-Lago (Florida) residence.
The former president has already said that he will maintain his candidacy in 2024 no matter how much he is accused of who knows which crimes or how many. And the law allows it. So the replay of the 2020 duel looks very likely today. Voters, also opposed by 60% that Trump also repeats, would have wanted something else. But what are we going to do about it..., at least for now.
