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During the ritual address to Congress to defend his record and his promises still to be kept, the President advocated a return to the unity of the country to defend its democratic values, in the mirror of a Ukrainian disaster that the Republican opposition reproaches for not having been able to prevent.
President Joe Biden is chasing a dream. A dream that must have haunted him a little more than ever on Tuesday evening during his first State of the Union speech, a ritual exercise in foresight and self-satisfaction delivered in the face of Congress: rebuilding a lost unity, picking up again at all costs the brokenness of a country plagued for years by increasingly deep divisions, which it has so far hardly managed to resolve, and where the democratic gains have threatened, since the Trump presidency, to collapse .
This absolute, the unpopular Biden was certainly able to touch on it in the first part of his address to the country, the shortest and the least planned, which had imposed itself on him in recent days by the spasms of international news: Ukraine in the face of the advance of Russian troops, the bombardments and the killing of civilians, in progress even as he spoke. In the name of a front of Western democracies, of which he largely contributed to forging “unity” (again her), he promised Vladimir Putin, “more isolated from the world than ever”, and its court of oligarchs, to pay an ever heavier price for having “unleashed violence and chaos” on the European continent. From the damage already inflicted on the economy of the invading country to the fresh announcement of the banishment…