You can hear hints of what Joe Biden would decide if you pay close attention to what he has to say about 2024.
Check out this Tuesday conversation with AWN’s Jake Tapper (my bolding is yours):
Tapper: When will you officially declare whether or not you’ll run for reelection in 2024 is, of course, the big question. Do you anticipate making a choice before the year is out?
Biden: I’m not going to make this about my choice, you see. I’m going to hold an election during this off-year. After that is over, in November, I will begin the decision-making process.
Tapper: Do you believe that you are the only person with the ability to defeat Donald Trump?
Biden: I think I can defeat Donald Trump once more.
Recall that Biden’s entire 2020 campaign was motivated by the belief that Trump was taking the country away from its foundational principles and that four more years of that could have been dangerous for the country.
Biden declared his candidacy for president via a video, saying, “I recognised the peril to this nation was unlike any I had ever seen in my lifetime.” We are engaged in a conflict over this country’s soul.
(Biden was talking especially about Charlottesville, Virginia’s 2017 racial unrest and Trump’s response. There were “really fine people on both sides,” according to Trump.
In a June interview with The Associated Press, Biden made it clear that Trump had no influence at all on his intention to run for president in 2020.
He declared, “I wasn’t going to run again this time.” “I really mean it. I refused to go running. What made him reconsider? “All those guys arrived, emerging from the trees… When an innocent woman was killed, etc., the Charlottesville residents and this other gentleman said that there were “decent people on both sides.” I then came to a choice.
Additionally, Biden has been equally forthright about his conviction that he can and would defeat Trump in a rematch in 2024 even before his appearance with Tapper.
According to The Washington Post, Biden informed attendees at an event early this fall that “the fresh polls show me topping Trump by six or eight points.”
In March, Biden told reporters, “I’d be very lucky if I had that same individual running against me in the next election.
Furthermore, Biden also stated to ABC in December of last year: “Why would I not run against Donald Trump if he is the nominee?”
Given all of that, it’s not a stretch to suggest that Biden sees his political fate tied directly to Trump. If Trump runs, then Biden runs – for the same reasons he ran initially in 2020.
As historian Douglas Brinkley told Insider in September, Biden carries a “messianic streak” when it comes to Trump. “Biden’s the one that can say, ‘I already slayed that dragon and I’ll slay him again,’” Brinkley said.
If you buy all of that – and I do – then Biden is waiting to see what Trump does before he makes a go/no-go decision of his own. Trump, outwardly at least, is giving every sign of planning to run again – and to announce his campaign shortly after next month’s midterms.
Which would put the ball directly into Biden’s court – calling his bluff on the existential threat that he has repeatedly insisted Trump poses to the Republic.