Biden has returned to the overarching theme of his presidency

View in browser

September 1, 2022

Stephen Collinson, Caitlin Hu and Shelby Rose

Seconds out, round two

Streamers cover Independence Hall in Philadelphia for a 4th of July celebration.

However Joe Biden's presidency turns out, he will be remembered as the man who ejected Donald Trump from the White House. Now he is renewing his effort to keep Trumpism from power through the 2024 election.

Biden will travel to Independence Hall in Philadelphia on Thursday to deliver a primetime national address on the "soul" of America. He offered a preview during a visit to Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, on Tuesday, when Biden lashed out at "MAGA Republicans" — playing off Trump's "Make America Great Again" mantra — to argue that they could not claim to be the party of law and order while still praising the January 6, 2021, rioters as patriots.

The origin story of Biden's presidential campaign is that he heard Trump equivocating about White supremacist demonstrators in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017, and felt compelled to launch a run most people thought had passed him by. He sees his 2020 and possible 2024 White House rival as antithetical to the American democratic experiment and the country's values.

After beating Trump, and amid the trauma of the Capitol insurrection, Biden sought to present himself as an agent of healing and unity. Now, with Democrats at risk of losing control of one or two chambers of Congress in November's midterm elections — and with Trump yet again at the forefront of politics — Biden has returned to the overarching theme of his presidency: the danger of Trumpist extremism.

His message isn't subtle. The spartan Independence Hall was the place where America's founders gathered to debate and then sign the Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution. They sought to escape what they saw as the monarchial, one-man rule of the British king. Biden, invoking the spirits of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams and Benjamin Franklin, will argue that once again, the will of the majority is under threat by one man's autocratic designs.

Subscribe to Meanwhile in America

The world and America

The UN said China may have committed 'crimes against humanity' in Xinjiang.

Prosecutors in Ecuador fear someone is killing endangered Galapagos tortoises to eat.

And Pakistan's floods created a 100km-wide lake.

Meanwhile in America, Trump argued that classified material should have been expected in the presidential records found at Mar-a-Lago.

SpaceX got a $1.4 billion contract for five more NASA astronaut launches.

And famed military academy West Point has a plaque depicting the Ku Klux Klan at its science center.

'Thirty years of neglect'

Jackson, the capital of Mississippi, has been living on borrowed time for years. Disaster struck this week, after a water treatment plant broke down, leaving thousands of people unable to drink from their taps or flush their toilets.

Residents of Jackson say that what little water is flowing is brown and grit-contaminated. Schools are closed and at least one hospital has no air conditioning. The crisis has exposed the infrastructure challenges that afflict many US cities, especially in the South, after years of under-investment and deferred repairs. Mississippi has declared a state of emergency and is rushing bottled water to the city and federal authorities are offering help.

The nightmare was triggered when pumps at one of Jackson's two water treatment systems were recently damaged. Heavy rains put extra pressure on back-up pumps that were overloaded, meaning failure was almost certain.

"I have said on multiple occasions that it's not a matter of 'if' our system would fail, but a matter of 'when' our system would fail," said Jackson Mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba, a Democrat. Republican Gov. Tate Reeves says the state will split the cost of emergency repairs with the city, but the mayor has said that fully repairing and replacing the outdated system would still require $2 billion in cash he does not have. "We don't have the funds in order to deal with 30 years of neglect," Lumumba told CNN.

Cars queue for water in Jackson on Wednesday.

Thanks for reading.

On Thursday, representatives from the International Atomic Energy Agency are expected to arrive at Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant in Russian-occupied Ukraine. Biden speaks in Philadelphia.