On the eve of third anniversary of the assault on the Capitol, the president of the United States, Joe Bidenoffered a speech this Friday in which he put the threats to democracyand especially the one that represents a potential return of Donald Trump to power, at the center of your message.
That intervention has also been, although the Democrat announced nine months ago that he would run again and has carried out some campaign and fundraising events, the great starting signal for that electoral race for the presidential elections, where everything indicates right now that he and Trump will replicate the 2020 duel. And he has done it with a forceful and devastating tone denouncing the republican, their actions and their plans.
A symbolic setting
Except for a storm predicted for the coast this weekend that forced the speech to be brought forward a day, nothing had been left to chance. Biden chose as the setting an educational center just 15 kilometers from Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, one of the emblematic places of the war of independence. There, the troops commanded by George Washington They endured the winter between 1777 and 1778 and what arrived as a coalition of settler militias emerged as a cohesive, disciplined and strengthened force, which five years later managed to seal its victory over the British.
Biden’s commitment to that place and the figure of Washington to mark the January 2021 insurrection and frame his campaign has not been coincidental. From the first president he took the idea of Democracy as a “sacred cause”. “This It is not a rhetorical, academic or hypothetical question”, has said. “Whether democracy remains America’s sacred cause is the most pressing question of our time, it is what the 2024 election is about.”
It is an idea that he had also used in his first campaign ad of the year, precisely titled “Causa.” In it he warns of “a extremist movement that does not share the basic convictions in our democracy” and that he calls “dangerous.”
But Washington has also served as a contrasting reference for Biden with Trump: someone who gave up command of the army and then voluntarily abandoned the presidency after his first two terms and inaugurated the peaceful transition of power which remained until 2020 when the Republican refused to accept the results of his defeat and promoted efforts to try to reverse them that ended with the assault on the Capitol.
Criticism of Trump and the MAGA movement
Biden, as his advisors had suggested he would do, and as he has done in the past in other speeches warning of the risks to democracy or the anniversary of the assault on the Capitol, has been direct about what happened on January 6, the role that Trump and what has happened since then played into it. He has been brutal, but stuck to the data in his description of the actions of Trump, whom he has hit with descriptions that are known to hurt him, such as “loser“.
Beyond these attacks, he has warned of the dangers that both he and his followers represent: “When the attacks happened there was no doubt about the truth. Even Republican members of Congress and Fox News commentators condemned him publicly and privately,” he recalled, “but as time has passed Time, politics, and money have intervened. AND MAGA voices have abandoned the truth and our democracy. They have made their choice. And now the rest, Democrats, independents and moderate Republicans, we must make our own way”.
Biden needs that message to sink in. Although 14 Of the 91 criminal charges former President Trump faces are linked to his attempts to overturn the election, according to a recent survey by The Washington Post and the University of Maryland, 25% of Americans believe the FBI was behind the assault. The percentage of citizens who believe that Trump was responsible has dropped in two years from 60% to 53% and stays in only 14% in the case of Republicans. And more than 70% of conservatives believe that it is time to turn the page on that episode.
The Democrat also has to combat the strategy that Trump is using, which is repeating the message that he is Biden “the true destroyer of democracy””, accusing him without evidence of being behind his accusations and thus trying to annul his main political rival. He even went so far as to call him an “insurrectionist.” after the courts disqualified him from appearing on the primary ballots in Colorado, a decision that he has appealed to the Supreme Court.
The Republican, who has promised to forgive those convicted of the assault if he wins, and has raised alarm bells with his autocratic plans for a second term, plans to give two rallies this Saturday in Iowa, where the first caucuses in the Republican primaries will be held next Wednesday. His campaign has not anticipated what he will address in his speeches.
Other challenges
Biden faces other challenges that go beyond its possible rival. Their approval ratings are below 40%many question his physical and mental state and the opportunity for him to return at the age of 81, does not make citizens perceive the progress in the economy and is seeing break up the coalition that brought him to the Oval Officeespecially between youth and minorities for his positioning regarding Israel’s war in Gaza.
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This also explains why he chose for his first big speech Pennsylvania, a pivotal state that he took from Trump in 2020, but that in November he could lose again. And it helps to understand the place chosen for another speech that the Monday. It will be in the Mother Emanuel Church in Charleston, South Carolina, where In 2015 a white supremacist committed a massacre of nine black people to try to start a race war. Once again he will be able to talk about the existential threat that extremism represents for the United States. And he will do so in the state that launched his candidacy in 2020, where the black vote is transcendental and which he has placed first this time in the Democratic primary process.
Your vice president, Kamala Harris, I was not with him this Friday at Valley Forge. But he has a campaign event Saturday also in South Carolina. And later in January he’s going to release a “reproductive freedoms tour”putting the defense of rights such as abortion at the center of the campaign, an issue that was fundamental for Democrats in the 2022 legislative elections and will be so again in November.