US President Joe Biden said Monday that he could run for president in the 2024 elections, but that he was not ready to announce it yet.
“I plan to introduce myself … but we are not ready to announce it yet,” Biden said in an interview on NBC before presiding over the Easter Monday event on the White House grounds.
“The decision has been made, but the pressure of having to announce what he has already decided annoys him,” said a source familiar with the matter.
In his last State of the Union address, delivered in February right in the middle of his term, Biden made no reference to his possible candidacy, although he did make clear his intention to continue governing and his desire to continue beyond 2024.
There had been speculation that April would be a likely time to announce his candidacy, given that it comes four years after he jumped into the race in 2019. And as vice president, he joined then-President Barack Obama in launching a campaign for reelection in April 2011.
At 80 years old, the president usually gives an image of fragility and one of the questions surrounding his future is whether he will be able to resist the physical effort of a campaign for the presidency, which can last almost 10 months.
Biden is scheduled to start his four-day tour of the British province of Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland tomorrow to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the Good Friday agreement, which ended three decades of conflict on the island. It will be a very exciting visit for the American leader, who was born and spent his early life in Scranton, Pennsylvania, one of the strongholds of Irish Catholics in the United States.
Biden’s rival in the 2020 elections, former United States President Donald Trump, has made his candidacy for the Republican primaries official to be his party’s candidate for the presidential elections.
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