“Freedom†is the first word that Joe Biden utters in the three-minute video with which he officially announced his candidacy for re-election in the 2024 elections yesterday. The president of the United States is running again to “finish the job †which began in January 2021. His goal, he says, is to defend personal freedom and civil rights against some “MAGA extremists†– the ultras grouped under the slogan “Make America great again†– who “want to cut Security Social while lowering taxes for the richâ€, as well as “banning books, dictating the decisions women can make about their bodies and telling people who they can loveâ€.
In the video, Biden combines such admonitions with a reminder of his proverbial confidence in the worth of Americans. “This is no time for complacency,†he tells them first, then adds, “I know America and I know how decent and good its people are. We are still a country that believes in respect and dignified treatment of others, in equal opportunities to succeedâ€, she affirms.
But perhaps the most important part of the electoral message is what the president and again the candidate does not explicitly say in it. Because what is clearly and above all is to prevent the return of Donald Trump, whom this time he does not mention and only shows fleetingly in a photo between magicians: a striking difference compared to the video with which he makes just four years ago he launched his candidacy 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 electoral clip is more subtle, with a greater implicit charge based on images with social media formats in which Biden underlines his support for the underprivileged, the black population and the LGTBI community while denouncing the assault on the Capitol or the Supreme Court ruling against the right to abortion.
So Trump is the elephant in the room for the Democratic leader’s announcement. And finish with Trump is the barely subliminal message from him under the headline of “finishing the jobâ€. Because, no matter how much the Republican has survived the demonstration of his lies and may continue politically alive even after his indictment for bribery and for whatever crimes can be attributed to him in the numerous proceedings against him, it seems difficult to imagine that the former president could overcome a new electoral failure against the current occupant of the White House, after all his great nemesis.
Biden, obviously, also does not speak in the video about his age, one of the Achilles heels of his candidacy, along with that of his limited popularity ratings. The president will turn 82 two weeks after election day, on November 5, 2024. If he were to win, he would reach the end of his term at 86. And these calculations weigh on an electorate that is 70% – including more than one 50% of Democratic voters – would have preferred another candidate on the progressive side, according to the latest polls. In polls, half of that reticent population cited the leader’s longevity as a key factor against him.
In the election ad, Biden also does not mention out loud his vice president, Kamala Harris, as a candidate to repeat at his side. But she appears in numerous scenes within the video, which at the end shows a sign with the name of both. And, in case there were any doubts, the number two herself confirmed on Twitter that she will repeat in her boss’s ticket: another daring decision by the president, given the even lower popularity of Harris (40% approval compared to 42% of the leader himself). and his discreet political profile in the two and a half years that he has been in office.
In response to Biden’s announcement, Donald Trump immediately released a kind of compendium of the tremendous attacks and accusations that he usually directs against the Democrat while warning voters of the apocalypse associated with his continuity. “Biden is the most corrupt president in the United States (…) We are like a dump, with cities invaded by millions of illegal immigrants (…), homeless people, drug addicts and violent criminals (…) Thanks to the calamity of Biden’s socialist spending, American families are being decimated by inflation, banks are failing, the dollar is collapsing  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 his adversary’s announcement but because of the start, in New York, of the trial of the civil lawsuit that the writer Elizabeth Jean Carrol filed against him four months ago for the sexual assault to which he would have subjected her in the mid-nineties .
Carroll accuses Trump of assault and defamation under a new New York state regulation (the Adult Survivors law) 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, adds to Trump’s recent indictment on 34 counts of forgery related to paying a $130,000 bribe to porn actress Stormy Daniels in order to buy her silence. around an alleged intimate relationship between the two.
The ultra-soon leader could 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 he took and hid at his residence in Mar-a-Lago (Florida).
The former president has already said that he will maintain his candidacy for 2024 no matter how much they accuse him of no matter what crimes or how many. And the law allows it. So that the reissue of the 2020 duel seems very likely today. Voters, also 60% opposed to Trump also repeating, would have wanted something else. But this is what it is…, at least for now.
