Former US vice president Joseph R. Biden Jr. has announced
his decision to run for president for the third time to challenge President
Trump in 2020.
The 76-year-old Democrat politician who served eight years
as Barack Obama’s vice president after more than three decades in the U.S.
Senate made the announcement in a campaign video released Thursday morning.
The core values of this nation… our standing in the world…
our very democracy...everything that has made America -- America --is at stake.
That’s why today I’m announcing my candidacy for President of the United
States. #Joe2020 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VbOU2fTg6cI …
Explaining his reasons for running, Mr. Biden began by
recalling the white supremacist march through Charlottesville, Va., in 2017 and
a counterprotest, and Mr. Trump’s comment that there were “very fine people on
both sides.” In that moment, Mr. Biden said, “I knew the threat to our nation
was unlike any I’d ever seen in my lifetime.”
“We are in the battle for the soul of this nation,” Mr. Biden
said. “I believe history will look back on four years of this president and all
he embraces as an aberrant moment in time. But if we give Donald Trump eight
years in the White House, he will forever and fundamentally alter the character
of this nation, who we are, and I cannot stand by and watch that happen.”
Biden’s first major campaign event is set for Monday in
Pittsburgh, where he is expected to speak about rebuilding an inclusive middle
class, according to NBC News. Biden will then launch a multistate campaign tour
with a focus on states with early voting, where he will hash out his vision for
closing the divides that are driving Americans apart, NBC reported.
