Biden shrugs off calls to exit presidential race as he takes aim at Trump’s ‘Project 2025’

Joe Biden on Friday came out swinging against Republican plans to install Donald Trump loyalists across the executive branch to enact draconian right-wing policies if he wins a second term.

The president, fresh off hosting NATO’s annual summit in Washington and less than a day after a marathon press conference, took to a rally stage in Detroit, Michigan to shrug off calls for him to exit the 2024 election race. Instead he told rallygoers: “I am running, and we’re going to win.”

He said he remains the Democratic Party’s nominee for president, citing his status as “the only Democrat or Republican who has beaten Donald Trump, ever.”

“I’m going to beat him again,” Biden continued, calling Trump “a loser” and reiterating his believe that Democratic primary voters — “not the press, not the pundits, not the insiders, not donors” — rightly chose him to take on the former president.

“You decided, no one else, and I’m not going anywhere,” he said.

Biden turned his attention to his presumptive opponent, the man he defeated four years ago, contrasting his own work strengthening the NATO alliance with Trump’s declaration that Russia’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine was “genius” and “wonderful”.

Biden also hit out at the press for reporting on his own verbal miscues, such as when he confused Volodymyr Zelensky with Russia’s Vladimir Putin when introducing the Ukrainian leader during an event on Thursday.

“I guess they don’t remember the Trump called Nikki Haley, Nancy Pelosi,” Biden said, referring to a moment several months ago when Trump claimed Haley — his former UN Ambassador who challenged him for the GOP nomination this year — was in charge of security at the US Capitol during the January 6 attack by his own supporters.

He declared that Trump would get “no more free passes” and said he was going to “shine a spotlight” on the ex-president and his plans.

“We’re going to say who he is, what he intends to do,” he said, calling Trump a “convicted criminal” who “was convicted by a jury of his peers of 34 felonies for paying hush money to a porn star and hide it from voters in 2016.”

He also pointed out how Trump was “found liable for sexual assault” by a jury, leading a federal judge to declare that what Trump had done to his victim, writer E Jean Carroll, amounted to rape “as many people understand the word.”

Biden also called Trump “a business fraud” who “lost his license to do business in New York State” and was fined “over $400 million” for providing false information to banks. He then noted that the ex-president still faces criminal charges for allegedly stealing classified documents and for his efforts to overturn the 2020 election.

“Most importantly ... Trump is a threat to this nation,” Biden said, calling the ex-president “unhinged” and repeating Trump’s promise to be “a dictator on day one.”

“He means it, folks,” Biden added.

The president then delivered a warning to supporters about what he described as a dire threat to the American system of government from Project 2025, a blueprint for the next Republican administration laid out in a nearly 1,000 page document published by a right-wing think tank, the Heritage Foundation.

It lays out how the next GOP president should gut the century-old civil service system in favor of installing loyalists across government who will implement draconian changes to the American way of life.

Biden called the plan “the biggest attack on our system of government, our personal freedom, that has ever been proposed in the history of this country”.

The president also warned that the plan includes a crackdown on abortion medication that would criminalize the procedure across the country, and would allow Trump and his allies to ban contraception by presidential fiat.

Biden referred his supporters to Trump’s plan to install loyalists across the Department of Justice to prosecute his political enemies as part of the ex-president’s “campaign of retribution and revenge”.

“Folks, that’s not the United States of America,” he said. “Another four years with Donald Trump is deadly serious. Deadly serious. His proposals are deadly serious. America needs to wake up and realize what Trump and his MAGA Republicans, what they’re trying to do.”