President Joe Biden marked the third anniversary of the January 6 attack on the Capitol by warning that the issue of American democracy will be “what the 2024 election is all about,” as he runs against former president Donald Trump once more.
Mr Biden, who spoke near the Valley Forge historical site where George Washington and the Continental Army were encamped during the winter of 1777 and 1778, told attendees that they were there “to answer the most important of questions: Is democracy still America’s sacred cause?”
“This isn’t rhetorical, academic, or hypothetical. Whether democracy is still America’s sacred cause is the most urgent question of our time,” he said.
Mr Biden said his speech, his first major event of the 2024 election season, was “deadly serious,” and about a topic that needed to be raised at the outset of his campaign.
He said the dark events of January 6, 2021 — nearly three years ago to the day — marked a day when America was “nearly lost”.
The president’s pointed remarks come nearly three years to the day that a riotous mob of former president Donald Trump’s supporters stormed the US Capitol in hopes of preventing Congress from certifying the results of the 2020 election, and as Mr Trump again campaigns for a return to the White House, where he has promised to be a “dictator” on “day one” if he is re-elected to a nonconsecutive term.
He said his likely opponent’s campaign is “about him, not America, not you” and slammed Mr Trump as being “obsessed with the past, not the future” while contrasting himself with his disgraced predecessor.
“He’s willing to sacrifice our democracy, put himself in power,” he said. “Our campaign is different. For me and Kamala, our campaign is about America. It’s about you. It’s about every age and background ... it’s about the future we’re gonna continue to build together”.
Mr Biden also recalled how Mr Trump had done “nothing” during the hours-long attack on the Capitol while the mob he’d summoned ran rampant.
“He promised it will be wild and it was — he told the crowd to fight like hell, and all hell was unleashed. He promised he would ... he would be side by side with them, then as usual, he left the dirty work to others and retreated to the White House,” he said. “As America was attacked from within, Donald Trump watched on TV ... the entire nation watched, the whole world watched in disbelief, and Trump did nothing”.
The president said the violence that day was the “one desperate act” left available to Mr Trump, and pointed out that even though Republicans in the House and Senate — and their allies on the Fox News Channel — had “publicly and privately condemned the attack,” the disgraced ex-president and many of his allies have chosen instead to accept a revisionist history, in which the attack was a peaceful protest and those who’ve been arrested for committing crimes that day are political prisoners.
“Trying to rewrite the facts of January 6, Trump was trying to steal history the same way he tried to steal the election,” he said, adding that Mr Trump still “refuses to denounce political violence”.
“You can’t be pro-insurrectionist and pro-American,” he said.
“As time has gone on — politics, fear, money – have all intervened. And those MAGA voices who know the truth about Trump and January 6th have abandoned the truth and abandoned our democracy,” he said.
“They’ve made their choice. Now the rest of us – Democrats, Independents, mainstream Republicans – we have to make our choice”.
The president’s appearance at Valley Forge comes as the Department of Justice marked the three-year anniversary of the January 6 attack by noting that there have been 1,265 arrests made of pro-Trump rioters, including 452 who’ve been charged with assaulting or otherwise obstructing police officers that day.
Of those arrested, 332 have been charged with obstruction of an official proceeding. There have been 718 defendants who’ve pleaded guilty, with 171 being found guilty after trials.
But the president noted how Mr Trump has chosen to lionise those criminals, and how he had “began his 2024 campaign by glorifying the failed violent insurrection at our capitol”. He also slammed the ex-president for using language that echoes the violent rhetoric of the Third Reich.
“He calls those who oppose him vermin, talks about the blood of Americans being poisoned, echoing the same exact language used in Nazi Germany. There’s no confusion about who Trump is, and what he intends to do,” he said.
According to sources familiar with planning for Friday’s event, the choice of Valley Forge for the president’s speech — his first major campaign event of the year — was intentional because of the site’s connection with George Washington, the Revolutionary War commander who became the country’s first president.
Mr Biden contrasted the late first president with the disgraced 45th and his supporters, and pointed out that many of the rioters who stormed the Capitol in support of Mr Trump passed by the iconic portrait of then-General Washington resigning his commission as a general in the Continental Army at the end of the American Revolution, setting a precedent of civilian control over the military that persists in the US today.
Continuing, he reminded attendees that the painter, John Turnbull, once called that moment “one of the highest moral lessons ever given to the world” and recalled how Washington “could have held onto that power as long as he wanted”.
“But that wasn’t the America he and the American troops of Valley Forge had fought for. In America, our leaders don’t hold on to power relentlessly. Our leaders return power to the people – willingly,” he said.
But he warned that his opponent, Mr Trump, is running to be the “denier in chief” by refusing to respect the results of next year’s election if he does not win.
“He doesn’t understand or he still doesn’t understand the basic truth, that is you can’t love your country only when you win,” he said.
