(Paris) Find the inspiration of Reagan, and attack Trump: this is what Joe Biden will want to do on Friday, in a speech on the site of one of the fiercest battles of the landings, Pointe du Hoc in Normandy.

Make no mistake: it is as much the American president as the Democratic candidate that we will hear, at 4 p.m. (10 a.m. Eastern time), on this rocky promontory in Normandy whose American Rangers seized on June 6, 1944, gaining a decisive advantage over the Germans.

The 81-year-old Democrat will therefore be thinking a lot about his 77-year-old Republican rival, while the polls are struggling to separate them, five months before the presidential election.

But it will also be the echoes of another Republican president, Ronald Reagan, which will resonate on Friday.

The former actor had delivered, at the same place on June 6, 1984, a powerful tribute to the “boys” who had fought there forty years earlier.

He had greeted “the guys from Pointe du Hoc. The men who took the cliff. The champions who helped liberate a continent. Heroes who helped end a war.”

“You all knew that some things are worth dying for. The country is worth dying for, and democracy is worth dying for,” said Ronald Reagan.

Like the Republican who preached for the affirmation of American power against, at the time, the Soviet Union, Joe Biden will refute on Friday the temptation of international withdrawal, embodied in his eyes by Donald Trump.

He will discuss the “dangers of isolationism” and explain how, if we bow to dictators and do not stand up to them […], it is America and the world that ends up paying the price. his national security adviser Jake Sullivan has already announced.

Nothing says that the American president, in search of solemnity, will pronounce the name of his rival.

The target of this Friday speech is nevertheless obvious: the Democratic president keeps repeating that during the election, “democracy will be at stake”, facing a rival who does not hide his fascination with authoritarian leaders and who seems obsessed with the idea of ​​“revenge” – facing the one who beat him in 2020 as well as facing the justice system that pursues him.

 “When this election is over, given what they did, I have every right to attack them,” Donald Trump has just said in an interview with the Fox channel, in response to questions about his intentions regarding his Democratic opponents.

Ukraine will obviously be mentioned in this speech by Joe Biden, the great architect of the Western response to the Russian invasion, and who is also due to meet Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in Paris.

By coming to Pointe du Hoc, the American president will want to embody authority in the face of voters who are concerned about his age, his physical vigor and his mental acuity.

His speech will also be a call to the many veterans of the American army: any vote is good to take for Joe Biden, in the perspective of an undecided election.

This week, his campaign team also broadcast a new television ad giving the floor to three former soldiers who sing the praises of the Democrat and who crush his opponent.

 “Donald Trump, he is not up to the task of being commander in chief,” assures one of them about the 77-year-old Republican, who according to the press saw the soldiers who died at the front as “losers.” ) and “poor guys” (suckers).