The outgoing American president, Joe Biden, This Sunday he spent his last full day in office in South Carolina, the state that strengthened his candidacy for the elections in 2020, and in addition to calling for hope, he stressed: “I’m not going anywhere.”
“We must hold on to hope. We must stay committed, always keep faith that a better day is yet to come. “I’m not going anywhere,” said the 82-year-old president in Charleston.
On a visit to that same state in January 2024, he had already stressed that he would not be in power without the people of South Carolina. “You are the reason I am president,” he told them then.
About to hand over command to the Republican donald trumpthe outgoing president emphasized that same idea: “I would not be in this pulpit without Jim Clyburn“, he noted in reference to the support received from that state congressman.
Although Trump won the 2020 elections in South Carolina with 55.1% of the votes, the White House has considered that state a turning point in his primary campaign.
“I prayed with you here in February 2020, when I ran for president. On my last full day as president, this was of all places the place I wanted to be,” he stressed this Sunday from the Royal Missionary Baptist Church, the same one he visited in that year’s campaign.
On a day in which pardoned five people, including African-American nationalist Marcus GarveyBiden also stressed the power of mercy and justice.
“With experience, wisdom, awareness, compassion and science, we know how healing and restoring harm is a path to the kind of communities we want to live in, where there is equity, justice and responsibility,” he said.
Biden spoke the same weekend in which Trump’s inauguration events began, who this Sunday woke up in Washington to begin his inauguration events with a offering at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier at Arlington Cemetery.
The elected president, who was already in power from 2017 to 2021, arrived in Washington on Saturday and this Sunday he offers a speech at the Capital One Arena, the same stadium where part of the celebration of his inauguration will take place on Monday after the events moved indoors due to the expected low temperatures.
This Sunday, Biden decreed a new batch of presidential pardons that consolidate his record as president with the most amnesties and sentence commutations.
The White House statement includes the presidential pardon for the president of the House of Delegates of the state of Virginia Don Scott, convicted of a non-violent drug crime in 1994, or posthumously to Garvey, convicted of mail fraud in the 1920s and a predecessor of civil rights activists such as Malcolm X.
It also includes migrant rights advocates such as Ravi Ragbirthe prevention of violence with firearms as Darryl Chambers or for the reform of the prison system as Kemba Smith Pradia.
“As president, I have used the power of pardon to make that promise a reality with more individual pardons and commutations of sentences than any other president in the history of the United States,” Biden highlighted. “The beneficiaries have made important contributions to the improvement of their communities,” he argued.
(With information from EFE and EP)
