Joe Biden predicts Russia will invade Ukraine, says Putin will regret it

President Joe Biden He said Wednesday that his first year in office has been one of “challenges” but also “enormous progress,” and said he did not foresee such heavy Republican obstruction of his government.

(Read here: Biden says he is ‘fed up with remaining silent’ and demands electoral reform)

“It’s been a year of challenges, but it’s also been a year of tremendous progress,” Biden said at a news conference on the first anniversary of his inauguration.

(Also: Biden blames Trump for the assault, on the anniversary of the capture of the Capitol)

It is the president’s first press conference this year and the first formal event of its kind since he traveled to Glasgow in early November for the international climate summit. During his speech, Biden evoked the mass vaccination campaign against covid-19 and the Economic recovery from the country.

The president referred to everything from the confrontation with Russia over the missile tests in Ukraine and North Korea to US inflation, covid-19 and what Biden himself considers a threat to US democracy from his predecessor, Donald Trump. .

The conference became an intense effort by the White House to turn the page on the dire past few weeks with a new narrative centered on what officials say are Biden’s many accomplishments in his first year in the White House.

The heralded event came as a new Gallup poll shows
Biden with just 40 percent approval, down from 57 percent at the start of his term. Since World War II, only Trump’s first-year numbers have been lower, Gallup said.

(In other news: The criminal gangs of Colombians that plague several US cities.)

“We went from two million people vaccinated at the time I was sworn in to 210 million Americans fully vaccinated today. We created 6 million new jobs, more jobs in one year than at any time before,” he said.

The Democratic president stressed that “it is not time to give up” when referring to talks with Iran to revive the 2015 nuclear deal. “Some progress is being made,” he said.

On the subject of fighting inflation,
Biden warned that it will take a “long-term” effort, attributing the skyrocketing price rise to problems in supply chains caused by the pandemic. Bringing inflation to a reasonable level, currently at its highest level in almost 40 years, “will be difficult,” he insisted at the press conference.

“Until then it will be painful for many people,” he predicted. On the tension on the Ukrainian border, Biden also anticipated that Russia would pay a high price if it decided to invade Ukraine, including a high human cost and deep damage to its economy.

“It’s going to be a disaster for Russia,” Biden said, adding that the Russians might eventually prevail, but their losses “are going to be big.” On the other hand, he announced that Vice President Kamala Harris will be his running mate again in 2024.

He also said he was confident Congress would pass “large portions” of his stalled social spending bill. That project is stalled in the legislature, as it generates division within the ruling Democratic Party. Likewise, he said he still hopes that the Senate will approve new laws on the right to vote, which a priori seem doomed to failure.

(It may interest you: Blinken warns that Putin could attack Ukraine in a “very short time”)

Are the Republicans coming back?

Biden’s press conference comes on the eve of the first anniversary of his inauguration on January 20.

With the traditional State of the Union address, a kind of accountability before Congress, scheduled for March 1, time is running out for Biden to change the mood before the legislative elections in November, when he is expected to Republicans crush the Democrats and take control of the legislature.

If that happens, he risks two years of obstruction by Congress, likely including threats of impeachment.

Trump, the Republican who continues to insist without evidence that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from him, is considering running again in 2024.

The White House hopes that the good news will slowly outweigh the pessimism related to the pandemic, with the economy recovering, the omicron variant of the coronavirus declining and Americans valuing achievements of
Biden like his voluminous spending on infrastructure.

As White House chief of staff Ron Klain told Politico: “The President
Biden was elected for a four-year term, not a one-year term.” But Biden himself has so far been tight-lipped.

While he interacts with reporters in brief and often rushed question-and-answer sessions at the White House, his lack of press conferences is conspicuous.

Since he took office and until December 31, he only gave nine conferences, against 22 for Trump in his first year and 27 for Barack Obama, according to a study by the White House Transition Project. The scarcity of individual interviews is even more eloquent: 22 for Biden, 92 for Trump and 156 for Obama.

AFP

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