VALLEY FORGE, Pa.—Though it seems like he’s been in campaign mode for months, Democratic President Joe Biden will kick his re-election drive into high gear here on January 5 by defending the U.S. Constitution and U.S. democracy, against what he defines as its biggest enemies: Donald Trump and his MAGA forces.
As he launches his campaign today, he faces a U.S. electorate overwhelmingly in favor of a ceasefire in Israel’s war on Gaza with numerous constituencies, including Arab Americans and youth in key battleground states, vowing to withhold support for him if he does not reverse course in the Middle East. Biden has repeatedly refused to commit to a ceasefire in a war that has resulted in well over 20,000 deaths in Gaza with 85 percent of the population now homeless and more than half starving to death.
The weapons, including all the powerful bombs Israel uses to destroy Gaza, come from the U.S. with Biden calling for $50 billion more in military aid to assist what people the world over are describing as Israel’s genocidal war on the Palestinian people.
Defending freedom, not militarism and war, was a winning theme for Biden in 2020, when he beat Trump in both the popular vote and the Electoral College, despite Trump’s attempt at stealing the election through an insurrection, invasion, and coup d’etat on Jan. 6, 2021. Major parts of the coalition that enabled that victory are now firmly demanding a ceasefire in the U.S.-backed Israeli war on Gaza.
In addition to supporting the war on Gaza, the administration is demanding $50 billion in additional military support for the notoriously undemocratic regime in Ukraine. Just a day before Biden’s campaign rally the New York Times, an early supporter of sending unlimited U.S. arms to fuel the war in Ukraine, noted yesterday that only 10 percent of the population of Ukraine believes what they describe as “war propaganda” pushed by the Zelensky government on the one and only television channel allowed by his government to broadcast.
Rather than mentioning the contradictions between Biden’s foreign policy and his calls for democracy at home, the media is focusing on questions about whether Biden, in his speech at the site of George Washington’s encampment with the frozen and hungry soldiers of the Continental Army, will mention his predecessor, Trump, by name.
If past is precedent, with two known exceptions, at Independence Hall in September 2022, and at a recent campaign fundraiser at a private home in the D.C. suburbs, the answer is “no.”
“As I stand here tonight, equality and democracy are under assault,” Biden said in 2022. “We do ourselves no favor to pretend otherwise,” Biden strongly declared at the start of that address.
Correctly stating what should be obvious to all, the president said, at the time, “Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans represent an extremism that threatens the foundations of our very republic.”
At the fundraiser, he elaborated: “We’re the only nation built on an idea—literally an idea. Not hyperbole. An idea: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men’…you know the rest.
“We’ve never fully lived up to it, but we’ve never walked away from it. It’s the idea that created America. And, ladies and gentlemen, we’re not going to walk away now.
“In three years, we’re going to commemorate the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. It will be a moment not only about our past, celebrating what we’ve done, but also about our future and all we can be.
“I don’t believe and I will not believe that, after all this time, what we’ve done as a nation, we’re going to walk away. From the fight for independence to the Civil War to world wars, after being blessed with leaders like Washington and Lincoln and Roosevelt and Dr. King, after having stood as a beacon of freedom, for equality in the world–for all the world–I don’t believe our 250th anniversary is going to turn to Donald Trump.”
People will descend on the nation’s capital next weekend to demand that Biden live up to the high ideals about which he speaks, and support a ceasefire in the war on Gaza. The Donald Trump regime about which he warns is more likely to come about if he does not.
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