{"id":37270,"date":"2025-01-15T10:45:00","date_gmt":"2025-01-15T16:45:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/?p=37270"},"modified":"2025-01-15T21:47:10","modified_gmt":"2025-01-16T03:47:10","slug":"joe-biden-says-soul-of-america-still-at-stake-in-farewell-letter-as-president","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/?p=37270","title":{"rendered":"Joe Biden says \u2018soul of America\u2019 still at stake in farewell letter as president"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

President implicitly acknowledges that country\u2019s divisions remain unbridged as Trump poised to return to Oval Office<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Joe Biden<\/a> has said the \u201csoul of America\u201d is still at stake in a valedictory message implicitly admitting that the national divisions that spurred him to run for the White House remain unbridged at end of his four-year presidency.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The acknowledgment came in a farewell letter<\/a> issued ahead of a televised speech from the Oval Office on Wednesday evening, when he will deliver his final address as president before being replaced by Donald Trump<\/a> next week.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI ran for president because I believed that the soul of America was at stake. The very nature of who we are was at stake,\u201d Biden wrote in what is likely to be a theme reprised in his speech. \u201cAnd, that\u2019s still the case.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The admission was an oblique recognition that Biden\u2019s legacy \u2013 touted in a long catalogue of claimed achievements at the end of the letter \u2013 is overshadowed by the impending return of Trump, who will be inaugurated on Monday after his election victory over Vice-President Kamala Harris<\/a> in November.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Biden made it explicit when he was campaigning for the presidency in 2020 that he was motivated by a desire to defeat Trump and cast the contest against him as a battle for America\u2019s \u201csoul\u201d<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He returned to the theme in a speech<\/a> in Philadelphia\u2019s Independence Hall in 2022, in which he cast Trump as a \u201cthreat to this country\u201d and said he and his Maga (make American great again) followers did not respect the US constitution.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

With the message now eclipsed by Trump\u2019s political comeback, Biden predicted \u2013 without naming Trump \u2013 that the values he had campaigned on would endure, despite the very different values espoused by the man who will be his successor as well as his predecessor.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cAmerica is an idea stronger than any army and larger than any ocean,\u201d he wrote.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIt\u2019s the most powerful idea in the history of the world. That idea is that we are all created equal, endowed by our Creator with certain unalienable rights, among them life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. We\u2019ve never fully lived up to this sacred idea, but we\u2019ve never walked away from it either. And I do not believe the American people will walk away from it now.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He added: \u201cHistory is in your hands. The power is in your hands. The idea of America lies in your hands. We just have to keep the faith and remember who we are.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

With Trump vowing to undo many of his legislative achievements, Biden said part of his legacy had been to make the country more secure after \u201cthe worst attack on our democracy since the Civil War\u201d \u2013 a reference to the 6 January 2021 attack on the US Capitol when a Trump-supporting mob tried to overturn his defeat in the 2020 election.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cFour years ago, we stood in a winter of peril and a winter of possibilities. We were in the grip of the worst pandemic in a century, the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, and the worst attack on our democracy since the Civil War,\u201d the president wrote. \u201cBut we came together as Americans, and we braved through it. We emerged stronger, more prosperous, and more secure.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He hailed his administration for ending the Covid-19 pandemic through a nationwide vaccine program and said it had engineered a successful economic recovery that created 16m jobs \u2013 despite persistent worries over inflation that damaged his popularity and contributed to Harris\u2019s election defeat.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It had been \u201cthe privilege of my life\u201d to serve the country for 50 years, Biden said, first as a senator, before becoming vice-president and, finally, president.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cNowhere else on earth could a kid with a stutter from modest beginnings in Scranton, Pennsylvania, and Claymont, Delaware, one day sit behind the resolute desk in the oval office as president of the United States,\u201d he wrote.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

theguardian<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

President implicitly acknowledges that country\u2019s divisions remain unbridged as Trump poised to return to Oval Office Joe Biden has said the \u201csoul of America\u201d is still at stake in a valedictory message implicitly admitting that the national divisions that spurred him to run for the White House remain unbridged at end of his four-year presidency. The […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":37271,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[1169,1563,32025],"class_list":["post-37270","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-politics","tag-biden","tag-joe","tag-soul"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37270","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=37270"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37270\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":37273,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37270\/revisions\/37273"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/37271"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=37270"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=37270"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=37270"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}