WASHINGTON — President Joe Biden never mentioned his successor by name in his goodbye speech to the nation Wednesday, but nevertheless made it clear he believes that American democracy is at risk.
“I want to warn the country of some things that give me great concern,” Biden said in a 16-minute address from the Oval Office. He then ticked off allusions to Trump and his wealthy advisers as threats to Americans’ freedom.
The outgoing president referred to Republican President Dwight Eisenhower’s farewell address in 1961, when he spoke of a “military-industrial complex” that was consolidating power in Washington. Biden said the new threat was a “tech-industrial” complex.
“Americans are being buried under an avalanche of misinformation. Editors are disappearing. Social media is giving up on fact-checking. The truth is smothered by lies told for power and for profit,” he said. “We must hold the social platforms accountable to protect our children, our families and our very democracy.”
Some of the richest men in the world — Elon Musk, who runs SpaceX and Tesla and owns the social media platform once known as Twitter; Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg; and Amazon head Jeff Bezos — have taken pains to demonstrate their support for Trump before and since his November election. The three are reportedly planning to sit together in a VIP section at Trump’s coming inaugural.
Biden further called for reforms to the Supreme Court, to Congress, to campaign finance laws and to the presidency itself.
“We need to amend the Constitution to make clear that no president ― no president ― is immune from crimes that he or she commits while in office,” he said, clearly referring to a Supreme Court ruling last July that declared that presidents do have such immunity.
The decision helped Trump delay federal prosecution against him, making a trial impossible before the election. Both federal cases were subsequently dismissed under longstanding Department of Justice policy not to prosecute sitting presidents.
Biden in his speech evoked the Statue of Liberty as a metaphor: its construction in New York Harbor after the Civil War, its endurance through more than a century of storms (“She sways a few inches, but she never falls into the current below”) and the workers charged with keeping the windows on its torch polished.
“He was known as the Keeper of the Flame,” Biden said. “Now it’s your turn to stand guard. May you all be the Keeper of the Flame.”
Biden’s term ends Monday at noon, when Trump is to begin his second term. Voters chose him by a narrow margin over Biden’s vice president, Kamala Harris, despite Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election he lost to Biden and a variety of criminal charges and convictions.
Biden frequently spoke of Trump’s efforts to remain in power in speeches throughout his term as a threat to democracy. He alluded to the dangers of “abuse of power” during his eulogy at President Jimmy Carter’s funeral last week.
Trump will be the first convicted felon in American history to take the presidential oath of office. A jury found him guilty of falsifying business records to hide a $130,000 hush money payment to a porn star just ahead of the 2016 election.
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Wednesday night’s speech, though, will not be the final time Biden speaks publicly as president. He is scheduled to address the U.S. Conference of Mayors on Friday, and then visit South Carolina on Sunday, his final full day in office. South Carolina was the state whose voters put Biden in a commanding lead for the 2020 presidential nomination after he finished poorly in Iowa, New Hampshire and Nevada in the previous weeks.