(NewsNation) — Marianne Williamson says she’s unsuspending her 2024 presidential campaign because she believes the U.S. needs a candidate who will more aggressively pursue a cease-fire in the Israel-Hamas war.
“I am that candidate,” Williamson said on NewsNation’s “Morning in America.”
The author on Wednesday announced she was “unsuspending” her long-shot 2024 presidential campaign.
The 71-year-old onetime spiritual adviser to Oprah Winfrey contemplated suspending her campaign in January after winning just 5,000 votes in New Hampshire’s primary, writing that she “had to decide whether now is the time for a dignified exit or continue on our campaign journey.”
But she is back in the race and has her eyes squarely on President Joe Biden.
“I do not believe that President Biden is a strong candidate for 2024,” she told NewsNation. “I think he deserves respect for winning in 2020, and some of the things that he’s done, but I think that the dynamics in America today are very different than 2020.”
Williamson first ran for president in 2020 and made national headlines by calling for a “ moral uprising ” against then-President Donald Trump while proposing the creation of the Department of Peace. She also argued that the federal government should pay large financial reparations to Black Americans as atonement for centuries of slavery and discrimination.
It’s those policies, along with her commitment to a cease-fire in Gaza, that are bringing her back into the mix.
“We have 39% of Americans reporting that they’re regularly skipping meals to pay their rent,” she said. “Over half of our bankruptcies come from medical debt — we have one in four Americans living in medical debt.”
On the economy, she hammered Biden for touting a post-pandemic economic recovery.
“We have ubiquitous economic despair in this country. (My views) are very much in contrast to the president claiming that somehow the economy is good. It’s good for 20% of Americans, but those 20% are living on an island surrounded by a vast sea of economic despair.”
She also supports Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders’ vision of expanding Medicare, which is currently only available to those 65 or older and younger people with disabilities.
“There are millions of Americans whose insurance will cover for them to go to the doctor. But it won’t cover the tests that doctors prescribe,” she said. “We have 1.3 million Americans who are rationing their insulin. There is no other advanced democracy in the world that does not have universal health care. That’s what we need.”
A Texas native who now lives in Beverly Hills, California, Williamson is the author of more than a dozen books and ran an unsuccessful independent congressional campaign in California in 2014. She ended her 2020 presidential run shortly before the leadoff Iowa caucuses, announcing that she didn’t want to take progressive support from Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, who was ultimately the last candidate to drop out before Biden locked up the nomination.