President Joe Biden will try to fire up his 2024 campaign
Friday with a major speech warning that democracy is at risk from Donald Trump,
three years after the January 6 US Capitol attack.
Either trailing or neck and neck with Trump in recent polls,
the 81-year-old Democrat will frame his likely Republican rival as a threat to
the nation in an address near the historic US independence war site of Valley
Forge in Pennsylvania.
A looming winter storm forced the speech to be brought
forward a day from Saturday, the third anniversary of the Capitol assault by a
pro-Trump mob trying to overturn Biden’s 2020 election win.
The effort to boost Biden’s faltering campaign by painting
him as a defender of democracy will continue Monday when he visits a South
Carolina church where a white supremacist shot dead nine Black parishioners in
2015.
Campaign manager Julie Chavez Rodriguez said Biden’s
election pitch four years ago that he was leading a “battle for the soul of
America” was more relevant than ever.
“The threat Donald Trump posed in 2020 to American democracy
has only grown more dire in the years since,” she said in a statement.
The venues for Biden’s first speeches of 2024 are
deliberately symbolic — especially the first, at a school near Valley Forge,
where George Washington, the first US president, regrouped American forces
fighting their British colonial rulers nearly 250 years ago.
“We chose Valley Forge as George Washington united the
colonies there,” said principal deputy campaign manager Quentin Fulks.
“Then he became president and set the precedent for the peaceful
transition of power — something that Donald Trump and Republicans refused to
do.”
‘Horrific’
The push at the start of 2024 comes after criticism from
some Democrats that the Biden campaign has got off to a slow start.
Biden has failed to convince voters that the economy is
improving despite favorable numbers, with Americans saying they are still
suffering from high food and housing costs.
Migration across the Mexican border remains a major
headache, while there is division in his party over his support for Israel’s
war on Hamas, and Congress is blocking his bid for more funds for Ukraine.
Biden’s refusal to mention Trump’s multiple criminal cases,
in order to avoid the appearance of influencing the judiciary, has also
deprived him of one of his most potent weapons.
But perhaps Biden’s biggest vulnerability is his age: as
America’s oldest-ever president, he has suffered a series of trips and verbal
slips.
Biden lags behind Trump, the man he beat in 2020, in a
series of polls, and also has the worst approval rating of any modern president
in the December before an election.
“If the election were held tomorrow, President Biden would
lose,” William Galston, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, told AFP.
Yet the Pennsylvania and South Carolina speeches show the Biden
campaign will now portray the race as a straight choice between him and the
twice-impeached former president.
The campaign is already treating Trump as the presumptive
challenger despite the fact that the battle for the Republican nomination
doesn’t even get underway until the Iowa caucuses on January 15.
Democrats are also targeting Trump on issues such as
abortion access and health care.
Biden’s first TV ad of the year meanwhile warns of an
“extremist” threat to democracy, featuring images of the Capitol attack and
dramatic music.
“It was a sight that was horrific,” White House Press
Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters on Thursday.
“The president is going to continue to speak about this and
continue to be very vocal about this.”
AFP
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