21 July 2024 , 18:58
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Joe Biden has announced he will not seek re-election against Donald Trump in November.
The incumbent president, who is currently self-isolating with Covid, made the announcement via a post on social media site X, formerly Twitter.
He wrote: ‘It has been the greatest honor of my life to serve as your President.
‘And while it has been my intention to seek re-election, I believe it is in the best interests of my party and the country for me to stand down and to focus solely on fulfilling my duties as president for the remainder of my term.’
Biden’s decision to stand aside in the presidential race against Trump will be widely received as bowing to internal Democratic Party pressure after his disastrous debate against the Republican candidate on CNN late last month.
During the debate, the Democrat candidate appeared confused and unable to finish his sentences.
Though the current president appeared to rally in the immediate aftermath of his performance, the following weeks had only seen gaffe after gaffe add frantic momentum to calls for him to step aside.
References to himself as ‘the first black woman’ to serve in the White House – and to President Volodymyr Zelensky as President Vladimir Putin, both bitter opponents in the Russia-Ukraine War – only further exacerbated pre-existing concerns over an alarmingly apparent decline the 81-year-old leader’s cognitive health.
Biden had already faced open calls to step aside from more than 36 Democratic Party representatives ahead of today’s announcement. His decision to bow out ahead of the election now fires the starting pistol on a separate, internal party race to find a replacement with enough political clout to challenge Trump in November.
A polling memo leaked from inside the Democratic Party earlier this week showed that alternative candidates were already leading against Biden by an average of 3% in key battleground states. But the document also says ‘voters are looking for a fresh face’, with figures less closely tied to the current administration performing ‘relatively worse than other tested candidates.’
While Vice-President Kamala Harris might seem to be the most obvious choice other names, such as Arizona Senator Mark Kelly and Maryland Governor Wes Moore, are already being floated within the party.
Trump, meanwhile, has ridden a wave of support and outpourings following last week’s assassination attempt on his life by Thomas Matthew Crooks at a rally in Pennsylvania.
Appearing at the Republican National Conference in Milwaukee just days after the failed shooting, Trump struck a defiant tone in addressing the crowds, many wearing bandages over their ears in a show of solidarity.
As one delegate said at the event: ‘He’s been persecuted more than, in my opinion, any person since Jesus Christ. And somehow he gets back up every day, when everything’s been thrown at him from every level, and still he stays and talks and fights for us.’
The attack was the most serious assassination attempt against a US president since the 1981 shooting of Ronald Reagan and has shone a spotlight on incendiary rhetoric from across the nation’s bitterly-divided political spectrum.
On Monday Biden was forced to concede to NBC News it had been a ‘mistake’ to say he wanted to ‘put a bullseye’ on Trump, though the Republican candidate has largely persisted along his previous track in the days since.
Trump posted to his social media platform Truth Social earlier this week to reference the shooting in calling for the dismissal of ‘all witch hunts’ – namely, the massive raft of legal proceedings against him on charges ranging from the concealment of classified documents right up to fraud and election subversion.
The tone of the Republican presidential candidate’s remarks bears striking resemblance to comments from party congressional representatives and online conspiracy theorists, who have claim the botched assassination was part of a ‘Deep State’ plot executed by extreme-left organisations.
Against the backdrop of these outlandish claims and the ever-deepening tensions they have fuelled, many feel whoever replaces Biden as the new Democratic party candidate in the coming days, the road to the election in November will prove to be the longest and most fraught in modern US political history.