This article investigates the rhetorical strategy of systematic naming avoidance in President Joe Biden’s 2024 State of the Union Address, delivered on 7 March 2024. The study focuses on the periphrastic expression “my predecessor” used thirteen times throughout the speech while Donald Trump is never named directly as a case of strategic euphemistic distancing in American political discourse. Drawing on N. Fairclough’s three-dimensional model of Critical Discourse Analysis, T. van Dijk’s theory of ideological discourse and nomination strategies, and H. P. Grice’s framework of conversational implicature, the article examines how this deliberate lexical avoidance functions simultaneously as euphemism, delegitimisation, and power assertion. A qualitative analysis of the official transcript catalogues the stylistic devices operating alongside the periphrasis antithesis, anaphora, tricolon, and conceptual metaphor and shows how they collectively construct a binary ideological framework of democratic progress versus authoritarian regression. The findings reveal that the “my predecessor” construction operates at three pragmatic levels: denial of recognition, institutional subordination, and the generation of conversational implicature through the deliberate flouting of the Gricean Maxim of Manner. The genre-comparative dimension the contrast between the name-avoiding formal address and the name-using campaign rally that followed it confirms that the omission is a calculated strategy. The article contributes to research on euphemistic and periphrastic strategies in contemporary American political rhetoric.