Biden says he's in race to keep Trump out

WESTON, Massachusetts — US President Joe Biden said on Tuesday he may have skipped a reelection bid if he were not facing Donald Trump, adding the Republican posed a unique threat to the country.

"If Trump wasn't running, I'm not sure I'd be running," Biden said at a fundraising event for his 2024 campaign outside of Boston. "We cannot let him win."

Biden's remarks come as even staunch Democratic voters have expressed concerns over the president's age. He turned 81 last month.

During his 2020 presidential campaign, Biden often mentioned that his decision to run was due in part to then-president Trump's handling of issues, including a 2017 white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Now, Biden's campaign is again positioning Trump as a danger to democracy itself.

Trump, who faces criminal charges over his efforts to reverse his 2020 election loss, has painted Biden as a dangerous autocrat.

Biden announced his reelection bid in April, after coming to the private belief that neither Vice-President Kamala Harris nor any other Democratic hopeful could beat Trump in next year's general election, according to a former White House official.

The president's aides increasingly think Trump will cement his status as a front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination in the coming weeks, according to two of those Democrats.

Fourth debate

US presidential hopefuls limbered up on Wednesday for the fourth debate in the 2024 Republican primary, with the race narrowing to a head-to-head battle to be the main alternative to runaway front-runner Trump.

But he has skipped the debates, seeing no advantage in sharing the stage with distant rivals, and rendering them a sideshow to the battle pitting his presidential ambitions against the might of the US justice system.

Meanwhile, former UN ambassador Nikki Haley has been on an upward trajectory, threatening Florida Governor Ron DeSantis' status as the most viable Trump understudy, six weeks ahead of the first nomination vote.

She hit out at DeSantis' faltering polling numbers and Trump's foreign policy record on Friday, telling Fox News she was proud of creating jobs and curbing crime as South Carolina governor in the 2010s.

Meanwhile, former Republican representative Liz Cheney, an outspoken critic of ex-president Trump who co-chaired the congressional probe of the Jan 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, said she is weighing a third-party bid for the White House in 2024.

In media interviews, Cheney said she was considering running for president next year as a third-party conservative candidate or on a bipartisan ticket that would include both a Republican and a Democrat. She cited Trump as a threat to democracy and the US.

"We face threats that could be existential to the United States, and we need a candidate who is going to be able to deal with and address and confront all of those challenges," Cheney told The Washington Post in remarks published on Tuesday.

Agencies Via Xinhua