He is 80 years old. On Election Day – November 5, 2024 – he will be two weeks away from turning 82. And 70 percent of Americans, including just over half of Democrats, did not want him to run for re-election, according to recent polls released this month. But Joe Biden has decided to do it. He considers that the goal of preventing Donald Trump from ruling the country again is above all other considerations. He managed to avoid it in 2020 and he is convinced that in 2024 he will do it again.
The president of the United States announced his decision early this Tuesday, just four years after the day he announced that he would run for president. He has done it in the same format as then: through a video where he explained his reasons; and with a message similar to that of that date (“If we give Trump eight years in the White House, he will forever alter the character of this nation,” he said in 2019) …, only elevated to the maximum power.
Biden does not have the popular support that one would expect in a president who aspires to repeat. The public approval rating for his work is below 43%. But, although even the Democratic voters said days ago that they would have preferred another candidate, more than 80% of them also assured that they would vote for him without any doubt if he finally ran. And the support of the party leadership for him to do it is now greater than a year ago; partly due to the success that, with him at the helm, the formation reaped in the mid-term legislative elections last November; and partly because of the lack of a clear alternative within the organization, at least for now.
Unlike this absence of strong rivals with a view to his party’s primaries, Trump does already have considerable and multiple internal opposition assured. But the one who is emerging as his main adversary, the governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis, begins to show signs of weakness in front of him. And the very profusion of competitors seeking to unseat him for the final race may favor him, as already happened in the process prior to the 2016 presidential elections.
The ultra leader is charged with 34 counts of forgery linked to his bribery of porn actress Stormy Daniels. And soon he may also be charged 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 he took and hid in his residence. from Mar-a-Lago, Florida.
But the former Republican president has already said that he will maintain his candidacy no matter how much they accuse him of no matter what crimes or how many. And US law allows it. So that the reissue of the 2020 duel seems probable today. Voters, also 60% opposed to Trump also repeating, would have wanted something else. But this is what it is…, at least for the moment.
