The beginning of the general election contest between President Biden and Donald Trump

is no time to shade the truth.

Let us be clear about something.

The overwhelming majority of the American people have said,

we don't want to see a rematch between President Trump and Biden.

Yet, that is the choice the American people will get.

And there is a profound difference between the two men. One of them, President Biden,

believes in the United States, American democracy, the values, ideas, and ideals of the great

republic, and the other one does not.

President Biden is an American, and Donald Trump espouses an anti-American worldview.

His is a vision of menace steeped in a promise of retribution, which always leads to

despair, death, estrangement, and ultimately loneliness. Donald Trump holds out a promise that is premised in a lie.

Now, that lie is born from an impatience with democracy,

with the work of ordinary men and women who are elected to the offices

and often succumb to the temptation of the power, the prestige, the influence, the money that swirls around them.

Our American system of government is profoundly corrupted

by foreign influence, by the influence of billionaires

who buy and sell politicians like little trinkets and totems on a store shelf.

The American system, though, must not be torn down.

It must be repaired, not replaced by a lie that posits a man can substitute his judgment for the judgments of the people,

that the impatience that makes democracy painful to go through in times of corruption

and malaise and stagnation is worth overthrowing

...