Biden expected to announce 2024 presidential campaign on Tuesday

Joe Biden is expected to announce his 2024 re-election campaign on Tuesday, possibly setting the stage for a rematch with Donald Trump.

Four years ago, when Mr Biden announced his 2020 presidential bid, he warned that the “soul” of the nation was at stake after four tumultuous years of the Trump presidency.

More than two years into his own presidency, Mr Biden has struggled to heal the sharp political and cultural divisions he believes are tearing at the fabric of American society. But he has racked up a list of legacy-defining legislative accomplishments while working to reassert American leadership on the world stage.

Following Democrats’ better-than-expected performance in the November midterms, Mr Biden has been open about his intention to seek a second term. For months, the question was not if he would run, but when and how he would announce.

Supermarket magnate driving Panama’s politics from embassy storeroom

---

Many young Chinese feel they have been denied the dream of globalisation

---

EU enlargement anniversary overshadowed by concerns about Russia

---

‘On the precipice of a large scale massacre’: Sudan’s war escalates with dizzying speed

---

Just before departing Ireland earlier this month, Mr Biden declared that his ancestral journey to the Emerald Isle had reinforced a “sense of optimism” about what he might yet accomplish at home. He told reporters that the “calculus” has already been made and it was his plan to run again. An announcement, he said, would come “relatively soon”.

Mr Biden appears to have signed off on a plan to announce his 2024 campaign with a video outlining his vision, as he did in April 2019. The president is scheduled to speak at the North America’s Building Trades Unions’ US Legislative Conference in Washington on Tuesday, an echo of his first campaign event in 2019, when he spoke at a union hall in Pittsburgh.

His team is touting the president’s historically productive start to his term – which included the passage of pandemic-relief package that temporarily halved child poverty, a generational investment in the nation’s ageing infrastructure, rare action to reform the nation’s gun laws, and a wide-ranging effort to combat climate change, lower healthcare costs, boost American competitiveness and arrest inflation – and an unexpectedly successful midterm election season that by historical standards should have been calamitous for the party in power – as reasons Biden is best suited to lead the country for another four years.

With Republicans in control of the House and major legislative action unlikely, Mr Biden has focused the second half of his term on selling these policies to the public. Presidential visits to Japan and Australia next month will give him an opportunity to emphasise his administration’s efforts to confront China’s growing economic and military influence.

Perhaps most urgently, Mr Biden must decide how to engage with House Republicans in a debt limit standoff. The House speaker, Kevin McCarthy, has proposed dramatic spending cuts, including to the president’s landmark climate and healthcare bill, in exchange for lifting the debt ceiling and avoiding a disastrous default. The White House has accused Republicans of holding the American economy hostage in order to extract painful cuts to social programs and repeatedly called on Congress to keep negotiations over the debt ceiling separate from a debate about fiscal restraint.

Political clouds hang over Mr Biden’s prospects. He is dogged by persistently low approval ratings and concerns about his age. Already the oldest president in American history at 80, Mr Biden would be 86 by the end of a second term.

Polls have consistently shown that most Americans, including a majority of Democrats, do not want him to seek a second term. That lack of enthusiasm is especially prevalent among young voters, who were sceptical of Mr Biden in 2020 but ultimately turned out in high numbers to help him defeat Mr Trump.