Joe Biden says ‘soul of America’ still at stake in farewell letter as president

Joe Biden has said the “soul of America” is still at stake in a valedictory message implicitly admitting that the national divisions that spurred him to run for the White House remain unbridged at end of his four-year presidency.

The acknowledgment came in a farewell letter issued ahead of a televised speech from the Oval Office on Wednesday evening, when he will deliver his final address as president before being replaced by Donald Trump next week.

“I ran for president because I believed that the soul of America was at stake. The very nature of who we are was at stake,” Biden wrote in what is likely to be a theme reprised in his speech. “And, that’s still the case.”

The admission was an oblique recognition that Biden’s legacy – touted in a long catalogue of claimed achievements at the end of the letter – is overshadowed by the impending return of Trump, who will be inaugurated on Monday after his election victory over Vice-President Kamala Harris in November.

Biden made it explicit when he was campaigning for the presidency in 2020 that he was motivated by a desire to defeat Trump and cast the contest against him as a battle for America’s “soul”.

He returned to the theme in a speech in Philadelphia’s Independence Hall in 2022, in which he cast Trump as a “threat to this country” and said he and his Maga (make American great again) followers did not respect the US constitution.

With the message now eclipsed by Trump’s political comeback, Biden predicted – without naming Trump – that the values he had campaigned on would endure, despite the very different values espoused by the man who will be his successor as well as his predecessor.

“America is an idea stronger than any army and larger than any ocean,” he wrote.

“It’s the most powerful idea in the history of the world. That idea is that we are all created equal, endowed by our Creator with certain unalienable rights, among them life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. We’ve never fully lived up to this sacred idea, but we’ve never walked away from it either. And I do not believe the American people will walk away from it now.”

He added: “History is in your hands. The power is in your hands. The idea of America lies in your hands. We just have to keep the faith and remember who we are.”

With Trump vowing to undo many of his legislative achievements, Biden said part of his legacy had been to make the country more secure after “the worst attack on our democracy since the Civil War” – a reference to the 6 January 2021 attack on the US Capitol when a Trump-supporting mob tried to overturn his defeat in the 2020 election.

“Four years ago, we stood in a winter of peril and a winter of possibilities. We were in the grip of the worst pandemic in a century, the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, and the worst attack on our democracy since the Civil War,” the president wrote. “But we came together as Americans, and we braved through it. We emerged stronger, more prosperous, and more secure.”

He hailed his administration for ending the Covid-19 pandemic through a nationwide vaccine program and said it had engineered a successful economic recovery that created 16m jobs – despite persistent worries over inflation that damaged his popularity and contributed to Harris’s election defeat.

It had been “the privilege of my life” to serve the country for 50 years, Biden said, first as a senator, before becoming vice-president and, finally, president.

“Nowhere else on earth could a kid with a stutter from modest beginnings in Scranton, Pennsylvania, and Claymont, Delaware, one day sit behind the resolute desk in the oval office as president of the United States,” he wrote.