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.
President Joe Biden will mark the third anniversary of the Jan. 6 attacks on the U.S Capitol with a political speech the day before to make the case that Republican Donald Trump poses an existential threat to democracy, Biden’s re-election campaign said on Wednesday.
Biden’s campaign said he will speak near Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, where George Washington established headquarters during the Revolutionary War. The speech site, Montgomery County Community College, is about 15 miles away.
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.
Biden will follow the Friday visit with a campaign stop on Monday at Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina, where a white supremacist in 2015 killed nine parishioners at the historic Black church.
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.”
