US: Marianne Williamson to challenge Joe Biden for 2024 Democratic presidential nomination

Self-help author Marianne Williamson launched a longshot bid for the US presidency on Saturday.

The 70-year-old onetime spiritual adviser to Oprah Winfrey is the first Democrat to formally challenge President Joe Biden for the 2024 nomination.

“We are upset about this country, we're worried about this country,” Williamson told a crowd of more than 600 in the nation's capital.

"It is our job to create a vision of justice and love that is so powerful that it will override the forces of hatred and injustice and fear."

Joe Biden is expected to announce in the coming weeks that he's running again.

His political advisers have said they aren't worried about the Democratic primary but that Biden is anxious to defeat Donald Trump again in the general election.

Biden, the oldest president in US history, would be 86 at the end of a second term. Most people in the United States, and even most Democrats, say they don't want him to run again, according to a poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.

Williamson, who is from Texas but now lives in California, is the author of more than a dozen books and ran an unsuccessful independent congressional campaign in California in 2014.

In 2020, she was best known for wanting to create a Department of Peace and arguing the federal government should pay large financial reparations to Black Americans as atonement for centuries of slavery and discrimination.

She said on Saturday that the nation faced so many challenges, “I’m not saying one person can fix it. Not even one president can fix it." “But let me tell you something," Williamson added. "A president who tells it like it is would do a lot of good.”

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