President Biden on Monday warned that America is living through an era of a “second lost cause” as former president Donald Trump seeks to reclaim the White House by continuing to argue that he did not lose the 2020 election to Mr Biden three years ago. Mr Biden compared Mr Trump’s refusal to accept that result to former confederates who claimed that the US Civil War was not fought over slavery.
Mr Biden, who travelled from Washington to the historic Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina, early Monday, opened his remarks by recalling the 2015 mass shooting at the church which claimed the lives of nine people including the church’s top pastor.
Speaking from the church’s pulpit, the president recalled how the convicted murderer who’d carried out the shooting had been invited into the church for bible study by the very people he killed, and said the “word of God” that day had been “pierced by bullets and hate and rage,” and “propelled” by the “poison” of white supremacy.
He also spoke of how families of the slain parishioners at Mother Emanuel had demonstrated “one of the greatest acts of strength” by expressing forgiveness for the gunman, and as he turned to a personal anecdote about how he’d been comforted by parishioners there in the wake of his eldest son’s death, a protester began interrupting the president.
The sole protester was shouting about how Mr Biden should call for a ceasefire in Gaza if he’d “really cared” about the lives taken during the shooting. She was quickly joined by more protesters who chanted: “Ceasefire, now!”
The president’s immediate response was to attempt to calm the protesters, telling them “that’s alright” as they were escorted out by security.
After they were removed while parishoners chanted “four more years,” Mr Biden said he “understand[s] the passion” of the protesters.
“And I’ve been quietly working with the Israeli government to get them to reduce and significantly get out of Gaza,” he said.
One woman responded by shouting: “You’re a good man!”
Continuing, Mr Biden began to recall how after the American Civil War, the defeated pro-slavery Confederates “couldn’t accept the verdict of the war they had lost” and instead embraced what has become known as the Lost Cause, described by Mr Biden as “a self-serving lie that the Civil War was not about slavery, but about states rights”.
In what appeared to be a reference to former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley’s recent refusal to explicitly state that disputes over slavery drove the conflict, Mr Biden said: “Let me be clear — for those who don’t seem to know, slavery was the cause of the Civil War”.
“There’s no negotiation about that,” he added.
He then explicitly compared the “lost cause” mythology that sprang up in the defeated South to Mr Trump and his supporters’ refusal to accept the ex-president’s loss in the 2020 election, calling the disgraced former president’s movement a dire threat to the civic life of the nation.
“Now, we're living in an era of a second loss cause once again, where some of this country is trying to turn a loss into a lie ... which if allowed to live, will once again bring terrible damage to this country, a lie about the 2020 election,” he said.
Mr Biden noted that two days ago was the anniversary of the January 6 attack on the Capitol by a riotous mob of Mr Trump’s supporters, calling that event “one of the darkest days in American history” when “insurrectionists stormed the United States Capitol ... to stop the peaceful transfer of power in the country”.
“We saw with our own eyes, the truth of what happened that day: A violent mob was whipped up by lies from a defeated former president, smashing windows, smearing blood on statues, ransacking offices,” he said, adding how the nation also saw that day “insurrectionists waving Confederate flags inside the halls of Congress” — something not seen even during the darkest days of the US Civil War.
Mr Biden warned that an “extreme movement in America” of “Maga Republicans, led by a defeated president” had “tried to steal an election” and is now “trying to steal history” by peddling the lie that the January 6 attack was a “peaceful protest” and called Mr Trump’s refusal to act to stop the mob that day “among the worst derelictions of duty by any president in American history”.
The president’s remarks, his second major campaign speech of the 2024 election season, come just two days after the anniversary of the January 6 attack and followed another set of remarks delivered near the Valley Forge historical site in Pennsylvania.
For the second time, Mr Biden connected the January 6 attack and Mr Trump’s election denial movement to the opposition to other reactionary movements that sought to roll back progress on civil rights for minority groups.
“That same movement ... is determined to erase history and your future,” he said. “Banning books, denying your right to vote and have it counted, destroying diversity, equality, inclusion all across America, harbouring hate and replacing hope with anger and resentment and a dangerous view of America”.
“Every stride forward has often been met with ferocious backlashes from those who fear the progress, from those who exploit that fear for their own personal gain, from those who traffic and lies told for profit and power,” he continued, adding that Charleston residents “know the power of truth,” and citing the example of Mamie Till Mobley, the mother of slain Black teenager Emmitt Till, who insisted that her son be given an open casket funeral so people could see the damage done to his body during his lynching.
“She said: ‘Let the world see when I saw,’” he said.
“The truth matters. It always mattered. We can't just learn, choose to learn what we want to know and not we should know. We should know the good, the bad, the truth of who we are. That’s what great nations do, and we’re a great nation — the greatest of all the nations”.
The president, whose 2020 election victory was powered in large part by Black voters, also told the congregation he was there to “speak to another truth” — that “because of the Black community of South Carolina,” he was there to speak to them as President of the United States, and said he has done his best to “honour their trust”.
“I said we’d invest in all America, all America and we are,” he said. “The results are clear — over 14 million new jobs, record economic growth, the lowest inflation rate of any major economy in the world, but we have more to do”.
