WASHINGTON — President Biden formally announced on Tuesday that he would seek a second term in office, arguing that American democracy continues to face a serious threat from former President Donald J. Trump as he follows the possibility of a climax between the two year has created.
In a video that flashed footage of a mob of Trump supporters storming the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, the president said the “fight for our democracy” has been “the work of my first term” but is incomplete, while his predecessor a comeback campaign for his old office that Mr Biden suggested would jeopardize fundamental rights.
“Across the country, MAGA extremists are lining up to take away those fundamental freedoms,” Biden said, using Trump’s Make America Great Again slogan to describe the former president’s allies. “Cut back on the social security you’ve paid all your life while lowering taxes for the very rich. Dictating what healthcare decisions women can make, banning books and telling people who to love. All this while it becomes more difficult for you to vote.
“When I ran for president four years ago,” he added, “I said we were in a battle for the soul of America. And we still are.”
The official statement finally ended any lingering tension over Mr Biden’s intentions and effectively paved the way for another presidential nomination barring any unforeseen developments. Although he had repeatedly and consistently said he intended to run, Mr. Biden fueled renewed speculation by delaying his kickoff for months. Now his team can put together the formal structure of a campaign organization and raise money to fund it.
Biden tapped Julie Chávez Rodríguez, a senior White House adviser and granddaughter of iconic labor leader Cesar Chávez, as his campaign manager. Quentin Fulks, a Democratic operative who recently led Senator Raphael Warnock’s 2022 re-election campaign in Georgia, will serve as her chief deputy. But the operation is expected to be overseen from the White House by top presidential aides.
While he described himself as “a bridge” to the next generation during his 2020 campaign, a comment that some interpreted as a hint that he would only serve one term, Biden concluded that he was in fact not ready to hand over the torch . yet. His decision was fueled in part, aides said, by his antipathy for Mr. Trump and his belief that he is the Democrat best positioned to prevent the indicted and twice-imposed former president from retaking the White House.
By re-listing himself as a candidate, Mr. Biden is asking Americans to entrust him with the powers of the Supreme Commander well into his ninth decade. At 80, Mr. Biden is already the oldest president in US history, and if he won, he would be 86 at the end of a second term, nearly nine years older than Ronald Reagan was when he left the White House . in 1989. Mr. Trump, at 76 no younger, himself would outlive any president by age, except Mr. Biden, if reinstated to the Oval Office and ending his new term at 82.
At the time, when Mr. Biden formally kicked off his campaign, he appeared to be a virtual lock to win his party’s nomination. While many Democrats had hoped he would relinquish to a younger candidate, no formidable challenger for the nomination has emerged. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a son of the iconic slain senator and a vocal critic of vaccines, and Marianne Williamson, the self-help author whose 2020 campaign fizzled before the first votes were cast, have announced long-running bids but pose little clear threat for the sitting president.
If Mr. Biden and Mr. Trump agree again next year, it would be the first time the same nominees have faced each other in consecutive presidential elections since 1956, when Dwight D. Eisenhower defeated Adlai Stevenson for a second time. It would also be the first time a president had been challenged by his predecessor since Theodore Roosevelt attempted a comeback in 1912 against his hand-picked successor, William Howard Taft, in a three-way campaign won by Woodrow Wilson.
While Mr. Biden leads a more united party than his potential challenger, many Democrats privately worry that the president may not be ready for another campaign. His overall approval rating stalls at just over 42 percent, according to a collection of polls from political website FiveThirtyEight, lower than 10 of the last 13 presidents currently in their terms.
While polls show that most Democrats have a favorable view of Mr Biden, a majority of them would prefer that he not run again. In an NBC News survey released this week, 70 percent of Americans, including 51 percent of Democrats, said they should not seek a second term. Seven out of 10 of those who did not want him to serve another four years cited his age as a factor.
Mr Biden and Mr Trump face a strikingly competitive race, with recent polls from Yahoo News, The Wall Street Journal and Morning Consult showing the president slightly ahead, while surveys from The Economist and Harvard University Center for American Political Studies shows that he lags behind on several counts. Mr. Biden faces similarly mixed results against Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, Mr. Trump’s strongest challenger for the Republican nomination.
Mr Biden’s announcement represented the latest unlikely chapter in a long life in public office, the fourth time he has thrown his hat into the presidential ring and presumably the final campaign of a career spanning more than half a century that began with his election to the NewsMadura. Castle County Council in 1970.
Over the course of 36 years in the Senate, eight years as Vice President and campaigns for the White House in 1988, 2008 and 2020, Mr. Biden has become one of the most recognized faces in American life, known for his resilience in adversity as well as his usual blunders. And yet the paternal, backslapping, work-across-the-aisle dealmaker has struggled to turn decades of goodwill into the unifying presidency he promised.
Operating by the narrowest partisan margins in Congress, Biden won some of the most ambitious legislative victories of any modern president in his first two years, including a $1.9 trillion Covid-19 relief package; a $1 trillion program to rebuild the country’s roads, highways, airports and other infrastructure; and major investments to combat climate change, reduce the cost of prescription drugs for seniors, treat veterans exposed to toxic fire pits, and build the nation’s semiconductor industry. Some of those bills passed with a Republican vote.
Along the way, he has revived international alliances that had frayed under Trump, rallying NATO and other partners around the world to oppose Russia’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine. With bipartisan support, he has pledged more than $100 billion to arm Ukraine’s military and help the government and people survive the Russian onslaught.
Yet his decision to withdraw his troops from Afghanistan after 20 years, in accordance with an agreement negotiated by Mr Trump with the Taliban, led to a debacle in 2021 in which the radical militants took over the country, fleeing Afghans swarmed US planes that took off from Kabul and a suicide bomber killed 13 US troops and 170 Afghans during the withdrawal.
Mr Biden has also struggled to secure the southwestern border of the US, where illegal migration has soared, and he has had mixed success stabilizing the post-pandemic economy, which has seen inflation reach its highest level in four decades and gas prices skyrocketed to record levels. While both are starting to fall again and unemployment is near historic lows, many Americans remain unsettled by economic fears.
Perhaps most frustratingly for Mr. Biden, his hopes of healing the rifts that widened under Mr. Trump have so far dashed, with American society still deeply polarized and his predecessor still a powerful force in fueling the forces of division and the encouragement of white supremacists and anti-Semites.
The president’s critics say that Mr. Biden is the divisive one for his attacks on Mr. Trump’s “ultra-MAGA Republicans,” and they portray him as a socialist bent on destroying the country. Regardless of who they nominate, Republicans expect to challenge Biden next year by linking him to the country’s economic problems and portraying him as a worthless leader held captive by his party’s activist left.
Even as Mr. Biden delayed a formal kickoff for his re-election bid, his team had been quietly planning for the campaign ahead. Top advisers such as Anita Dunn, Steven J. Ricchetti and Jennifer O’Malley Dillon will oversee the campaign from the White House, though the operation’s formal headquarters will almost certainly be in Wilmington, Del. will be, under the leadership of Ms. Chavez Rodriguez.
But it will be very different from any campaign Mr Biden has ever run in. His first two bids for the White House each collapsed by the end of the first caucus, in a time long before social media and modern technological techniques were ubiquitous, and his 2020 campaign was distorted by the Covid-19 pandemic, leaving he is largely isolated in his home in Delaware.
This time, aides said he planned a vigorous campaign itinerary but would rely heavily on digital communications that would bypass traditional news media. The upcoming contest will be complicated by the fact that his opponent has been criminally charged by a local New York Democratic prosecutor on charges of covering up hush money paid to a porn star and is under investigation by Mr Biden’s own Justice Department for incitement until the 6 Jan. 2021, attack on the Capitol and illegal refusal to hand over classified documents.
While Mr. Biden has been publicly silent on Mr. Trump’s legal troubles, the former president has tried to pin the blame on the incumbent, accusing him of using the justice system against him out of partisan animosity. No evidence has surfaced to that effect, but Biden’s own dealings with classified documents are being investigated by special counsel and his son Hunter Biden is being investigated by another federal prosecutor.
Mr Biden’s strategists acknowledge that he is starting the campaign with significant vulnerabilities, but are running on the notion that as ambivalent as voters may be about him, they are absolutely against putting Mr Trump back in the White House . If they run against another Republican, they plan to argue that whoever wins that party’s nomination will have to take the same radical positions as Mr. Trump.
