Finance
US President Joe Biden portrayed former President Donald Trump, who seems to have a grip on the Republican nomination, as the main threat in setting up the presidential race later this year as a fight to preserve American democracy.
“Today we’re here to answer the most important of questions: Is democracy still America’s sacred cause?” Biden said in his first campaign speech of the year. “It’s what the 2024 election is all about.” He left no doubt who he thought posed the biggest threat to democracy.
“Trump is trying to steal history the same way he tried to steal the election,” he said. “We saw it with our own eyes. Trump’s mob wasn’t a peaceful protest. It was a violent assault. They were insurrectionists, not patriots…”
Biden was alluding to the massive throng of Trump’s followers who stormed the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, to stop lawmakers from accrediting Biden as the victor of the 2020 presidential election.
The President’s speech was given from a community college in Pennsylvania, 10 miles from Valley Forge National Historical Park, the site where George Washington rallied troops during the Revolutionary War against the British approximately 250 years ago. It was given on the eve of the third anniversary of the deadliest attack on American democracy in US history.
In a 30-minute address, Biden spoke to Trump by name 44 times, painting the former president as his opponent.
Some analysts have suggested that Biden actually relishes the prospect of running against Trump again. Despite his popularity among Republican voters, Trump is a profusely damaged candidate nationally — impeached twice, and charged with more than 90 counts of criminal offenses in four cases and counting. He has also been booted off the ballot in two states, Colorado and Maine.
Biden would rather run against Trump than some of his other Republican rivals such as Nikki Halley, the former governor of South Carolina and ambassador to the United Nations, a federal cabinet-rank position. She is beating Biden in head-to-hear matchups by a wider margin than Trump and Ron DeSantis, the Florida governor who is locked with Haley in a tussle for the No. 2 slot in the Republican primaries.
Addressing a rally in Iowa, where Republicans will hold the first of the primaries contests — called caucuses — in 10 days, Trump said Biden was portraying the Presidential election as a battle for democracy because he wants to divert attention from the failures of his administration and also accused the President of using the government to file cases against him, alleging he was the real threat to democracy. “They’ve weaponized the government, and he’s saying I’m a threat to democracy,” Trump said.
President Biden has struggled with low poll numbers for most of his presidency, first on account of the aftereffects of the Covid-19 epidemic and then because of runaway inflation which shot to a 40-year high in 2022. The messy withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan has been a stain on his foreign policy report card, which now has two hot wars that are a drain on both US equity and treasury.
Democratic strategists and Biden’s aides have attempted to minimize his poll numbers in comparison to those of his Republican opponents, claiming that Americans aren’t particularly focused on the elections in November 2024 at this point and that the difference will close once voters see Biden’s record in comparison to that of his opponents. And later on Friday, Biden will begin to paint Trump as a danger to democracy.
Source:IANS
