If you listen carefully to what Joe Biden says about 2024, you start to hear the inklings of what might make up his mind.
Check out this exchange with CNN’s Jake Tapper on Tuesday (bolding is mine):
Tapper: The big question, of course, is when you’re going to make an official announcement, about whether or not you’re going to run for 2024, for reelection. Do you think you’ll make a decision before the end of the year?
Biden: Well, look, I’m not going to make this about my decision. I’m going to make this off-year election. After that’s done, in November, and then I’m going to be in the process of deciding.
Tapper: Is one of the calculations that you think you’re the only one who can beat Donald Trump?
Biden: I believe I can beat Donald Trump again.
Now, remember that the entire reason that Biden ran in 2020 was centered on Trump – and the notion that the Republican President was leading the country away from its founding ideals, and that four more years of that could have put the nation in peril.
“I knew the threat to this nation was unlike any I had ever seen in my lifetime,” Biden said in a video announcing his presidential bid. “We are in a battle for the soul of this nation.”
(Biden was speaking specifically about the 2017 race riot in Charlottesville, Virginia, and Trump’s response to it. Trump said there were “very fine people on both sides.”)
In an interview with The Associated Press in June, Biden was unequivocal that his decision to run in 2020 was entirely dependent on Trump.
“I wasn’t going to run again, this time,” he said. “I mean for real. I was not going to run.” What changed his mind? “All those guys came, come out of the woods … the Charlottesville folks and this other guy said ‘good people on both sides’ when an innocent woman was killed, etc. And, I made a decision.
And, even before his interview with Tapper, Biden has been similarly blunt about his belief that he can and would beat Trump in a 2024 rematch.
At an event earlier this fall, Biden told attendees, “the new polls showing me beating Trump by six or eight points,” according to The Washington Post.
“The next election – I’d be very fortunate if I had that same man running against me,” Biden told reporters in March.
And as far back as last December, Biden told ABC: “Why would I not run against Donald Trump if he’s 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.
