By Michael Collins
WASHINGTON, DC — President Joe Biden will mark the third anniversary of the Jan. 6 mob attack on the U.S. Capitol by evoking a pivotal moment from the Revolutionary War to make the case that democracy is on the line in this year’s presidential election. Biden’s campaign said he will lay out the stakes for the election in a campaign speech Saturday near Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, where nearly 250 years ago the nation’s forefathers transformed a disorganized alliance of colonial militias into a cohesive coalition in the fight for democracy and independence from England.
Comparisons between Valley Forge and this year’s election are legitimate, the campaign said. Former President Donald Trump, the likely GOP nominee, has made it clear he will dismantle and destroy democracy if he is re-elected, the campaign told reporters.
“The president will make the case directly that democracy and freedom – two powerful ideas that united the 13 colonies and that generations throughout our nation’s history have fought and died for a stone’s throw from where he will be – remain central to the fight we’re in today,” said Biden’s deputy campaign manager Quentin Fulks.
President Joe Biden will warn that democracy is at stake in this year’s election during a campaign speech on the third anniversary of the Jan. 6th attacks on the U.S. Capitol.
Biden will also take his reelection campaign to Charleston, South Carolina, on Monday, when he will deliver a similar message at the Emanuel AME Church, a storied African American house of worship. The church was the site of a deadly mass shooting on June 17, 2015, when the pastor and eight other worshippers gathered for Bible study were killed by a white supremacist shouting racial epithets.
Biden has ramped up his criticism of Trump at a series of campaign fundraisers in recent weeks as polls show a tight race. Iowa voters are gearing up for the first-in-the-nation presidential caucuses in just two weeks. A new USA TODAY/Suffolk University Poll released Monday showed Biden narrowly trailing Trump 39 percent to 37 percent.
Biden will use his remarks in Pennsylvania on Saturday to remind voters of Trump’s efforts to hang onto power after losing the 2020 election and of the violent insurrection in Washington three years ago. A mob of Trump supporters attacked the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, in an effort to stop Congress from certifying the election results.
A House committee that investigated the insurrection concluded that “the central cause of Jan. 6 was one man” – Trump. “None of the events of January 6th would have happened without him,” the committee’s report said.
With Trump as the likely GOP nominee in this year’s election, “the choice for voters (this) year will not simply be between competing philosophies of government,” Biden campaign manager Julia Chavez Rodriguez said. “The choice for the American people in November 2024 will be about protecting our democracy and every American’s fundamental freedoms.”
Michael Tyler, the Biden campaign’s communication director, said Americans must recognize the “gravity and significance of the moment we’re all living through.”
“The leading candidate of a major party in the United States is running for president so that he can systematically dismantle and destroy our democracy,” Tyler said. “Trump is running a campaign of revenge, of retribution.”
Vice President Kamala Harris also will hit the road this month to spread the message that fundamental freedoms are in jeopardy.
She will speak Saturday in Columbia, South Carolina, at a retreat for women leaders of an African-American church. She also will travel to Wisconsin for an event focused on reproductive freedom on Jan. 22, the 51st anniversary of the Supreme Court’s landmark Roe v. Wade decision that legalized abortion. The Supreme Court reversed that decision in 2022.
Michael Collins covers the White House. Follow him on X, formerly Twitter, @mcollinsNEWS.
