Joe Biden says ‘soul of America’ still at stake in farewell letter as president
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President implicitly acknowledges that country’s divisions remain unbridged as Trump poised to return to Oval Office. Joe Biden has said the “soul of America” 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 acknowledgment came in a farewell letter 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 next week. “I ran for president because I believed that the soul of America was at stake. The very nature of who we are was at stake,” Biden wrote in what is likely to be a theme reprised in his speech. “And, that’s still the case.”.
The admission was an oblique recognition that Biden’s legacy – touted in a long catalogue of claimed achievements at the end of the letter – is overshadowed by the impending return of Trump, who will be inaugurated on Monday after his election victory over Vice-President Kamala Harris in November.
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’s “soul”. He returned to the theme in a speech in Philadelphia’s Independence Hall in 2022, in which he cast Trump as a “threat to this country” and said he and his Maga (make American great again) followers did not respect the US constitution.
