Donald Trump will not attend the handover with Joe Biden and wants to run again in 2024
The American President adds more every day in the denial of his defeat against Joe Biden. He continues to claim that victory was stolen from him. According to those around him, he might not participate in the handover in January. For his part, he suggests that he will run again in 2024.
As President-elect Joe Biden takes office on January 20, he announces that he will ask Americans to wear the mask for the first 100 days of his term. For his part, the incumbent President Donald Trump, reclusive in the White House, remains in his logic. He continues to ignore the dramatic figures of the coronavirus (with the United States reaching 3,000 deaths in 24 hours, the highest death toll in a single day), tries to take full credit for the rapid advance of vaccines and announces that he could well run for the 2024 presidential election.
A counter-event on the day Joe Biden took office
It is the tradition, even if nothing is written about it in the American Constitution: the outgoing President and the incoming President participate in the induction ceremony in January in Washington. The two presidents meet to "pass on the files" and the outgoing family leaves the White House the same day, while the family of the newly elected President takes possession of the premises after taking the oath.
This ceremony, attended by millions of spectators in Washington, and by millions of television viewers around the world, always proceeds in good harmony, whatever the degree of enmity between the two men. But Donald Trump decided otherwise. He would be considering not only not to participate in the ceremony, but to organize a parallel event, in a way a counter-party.
Donald Trump does not plan to receive Joe Biden, or even to call him. As a reminder, the American tradition is that the unsuccessful candidate for an election calls the winner as soon as the results are confirmed, in order to recognize his defeat. Donald Trump of course did not.
He is now targeting the 2024 presidential election
According to several media, starting with The Daily Beast, Donald Trump is in the midst of discussions to announce his candidacy in 2024 during this event organized on the day of the handover on January 20. Three people around him confirmed this information to the press, while claiming that he could announce his candidacy earlier.
If we are to believe "his stroke of humor" during a speech at the White House on Wednesday, the President does indeed have 2024 in his sights. Especially since for the moment, his support is still there. The Republican Party has not let go even if some elected Republican dissociate themselves, and its electoral base remains on its line: the election would have been stolen by Joe Biden thanks to a massive fraud of the Democrats, and only he could "repair this injustice "by standing again in the next presidential election. Without any proof having been presented.
"These four years have been fantastic. We're trying to do four more years. Otherwise, I'll see you in four years!"
The New York Times recalls that only one American President before him took the same step: Grover Cleveland. After losing for a second consecutive term in 1888, Cleveland stood for re-election four years later in 1892 and was elected. He was therefore 32nd and 34th President of the United States, at the head of the country from 1885 to 1889 and then from 1893 to 1897, after having bowed to Benjamin Harrison in 1889 and 1893.
For his part, the left-wing Democratic senator Bernie Sanders was led to react to this announcement by Donald Trump. For him :
"The Republican Party is a sort of personality cult dedicated to Donald Trump."
Increasingly isolated, he persists in his crusade to challenge Biden's victory
Despite an avalanche of legal setbacks, he hasn't changed his tone for a month. In a video released Wednesday afternoon on his Twitter and Facebook accounts, the president repeated his accusations, still without tangible evidence. He even described the speech as "the most important he has ever given in his entire political career."
In this speech of more than 45 minutes on Facebook, reduced to two minutes on Twitter, often confused, he says he is "determined to protect the electoral system".
Several American media highlight his narcissism, the only driving force that would still keep him in his logic of denouncing the result of the presidential election, while he himself would know very well that he had lost. His niece, clinical psychologist Mary Trump, who wrote an anti-Trump pamphlet ("Too much and never enough" Ed. Albin Michel) mentions mental problems:
"Not only is he not made for this job, but he is also dangerous for our country. The more it progresses, the more we will see his condition deteriorate."
