A fantasy: Assuming Joe Biden remains the Democrats’ presidential candidate, he steps up to the microphone and delivers the following speech.
My fellow Americans, I am speaking to you tonight because I want to be absolutely clear about my intentions in a second term as your president. I have said our country and the world are at an inflection point – a moment of great change. As someone (Buckminster Fuller) said, we will either be the architects of that change or its victims.
I am running against Donald Trump because he wants to force his warped vision of America on all of us – a vision that gives him and him alone absolute control not only of our government but of our lives. That’s what an autocrat does.
But he is not the only opponent. I am also running against a U.S. Supreme Court that is out of control, serving a radical right-wing agenda as a gift to oligarchs who would buy the presidency for the radical right.
I am running against a Republican Congress that no longer serves you. With very few exceptions, the 268 Republicans in the House and Senate have bent their knees and capitulated to Trump. With no voter mandate or legal license to do so, Trump has effectively taken over as Speaker of the House and minority leader of the Senate. This also is what autocrats do.
We have paid too little attention to the fact that 147 Republicans in Congress joined Trump’s attempt to overthrow the 2020 election by voting against certifying my victory. Many are still in Congress and running for reelection this year. Under the 14th Amendment, they should be banned from public office for violating their oaths to defend the Constitution, yet they remain unpunished.
But I am focused on the future now. We have a lot of work to do in the next four years. We must lower prices and improve the economy, narrow the wealth and income gaps, make sure that every eligible voter can exercise that right, restore women’s right to control their bodies, guarantee equal pay for equal work, restore the opportunity society, and confront global climate change, which is destroying homes and communities and raising the cost of insurance from coast to coast.
One of my regrets about the presidential debate was that I gave too little attention to climate change and environmental protection because these are existential issues on which Donald Trump and I are diametrically opposed. He still thinks global warming is a scam. He would undo all I have done to fight this peril. He did the same to President Obama’s climate plan and rescinded more than 100 environmental rules as president.
Yet while we debated in a television studio, the Associated Press reported that fires, tornadoes, and extreme winds were causing “havoc and destruction across the United States.” Willful ignorance, denigration of science, and denial will only allow weather disasters to become much worse.
There is enormous work to do overseas, too. We must continue to build and strengthen NATO and help Ukraine defend itself against Putin’s illegal invasion. We must help Israel and Palestinians reach a sustainable peace. We must renew the world’s commitment to eliminating nuclear weapons and stand up against tyrants rather than relishing photo ops with them.
But most of all, we must cure the virus of division and intolerance that infects our country. We must restore the social contract of mutual respect and civility. We must defeat the conspiracy to overturn democratic rule and freedoms. We must stop radicals, extremists, and haters from ripping the fabric that makes us one nation under God. We must send those who advocate the violent overthrow of our government back into the holes from which they came.
If Donald Trump wins this election, the American people can count on this: He will lie to you, divide you, and make you afraid every day of one wild conspiracy or another. That’s what he did the last time he occupied the Oval Office and what he has done nearly every day since. He will commit outrages just to bask in the attention. He admits that he’ll turn the federal government’s powers, including the armed forces, into his personal weapons of retribution. He will invite his MAGA militia to terrorize the families of anyone who dares oppose or criticize him because this is what autocrats and despots do.
Unless we intervene, the United States Supreme Court will continue to support him. It will use its power as the nation’s final legal authority to tighten the noose of radical conservatism around our necks. It has already begun. In the last year alone, the Court’s conservative supermajority legalized the bribery of public officials, crippled the EPA’s power to control pollution, put state governments in control of women’s bodies, and ruled that the president of the United States can commit crimes with impunity.
I will make this promise. If you reelect me and give Democrats control of Congress, I will ask for and use my authority to restore the ideological balance of the Supreme Court by adding four more justices. I have resisted this in the past. But there is no doubt now that the Supreme Court is the greatest threat to our democracy. Unless the legislative and executive branches of government fulfill their obligation to check the Court’s excesses, ultra-conservative justices will control the court for decades to come. They have taken away a fundamental right of women, and they will come for yours. America will never again be the nation the Founders intended.
With a willing Congress, I will restore the Voting Rights Act and make it easier, not harder, for every American to exercise their rightful power. I will urge Congress to approve a constitutional amendment to eliminate the Electoral College, so presidents are elected by popular majority. I will continue working with and leading the international community to restore climate stability, protect biodiversity, and repair the damage we have done to ecosystems. I will defend our quality of life against corporate greed.
To those who say corporations should care only about profit and call environmental protection woke, I say this. Our God-given rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness mean little if the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the food we eat are contaminated with deadly pollution and chemicals.
This is not empty rhetoric. Four in 10 Americans still live where it is dangerous to breathe. As many as 200,000 Americans die prematurely from causes associated with air quality. More than 250,000 Americans live in so-called sacrifice zones where fossil-fuel and chemical pollution have raised the risk of cancer to unacceptable levels. And more than a third of the species and ecosystems in the United States are at risk of disappearing.
Doing something about these problems is not woke. It’s awake. However, the Supreme Court is methodically attacking our ability to solve them. And Donald Trump’s response is illustrated by his reported promise to oil executives that he will give them whatever they want if they give him $1 billion to defeat me.
So yes, the quality of our lives, the decency of society, and the survival of democracy are on the ballot in November. Yet my opponents would make this election about my age.
I do not claim that Democrats are perfect. But I promise we will not violate the Constitution, our ethical obligations, or the public trust. We will not give in to tyrants, lawlessness, or gridlock.
If you give us control of the White House and Congress, we will put things right. We will put government, democracy, and America back on course.
I have been in politics and public service for 50 years, and there has never been a more important mission than this.