Joe Biden will try to boost his campaign for the 2024 US presidential election with a major speech on Friday highlighting the risks he says Donald Trump poses to democracy three years after the attack on the Capitol.
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The 81-year-old Democrat, who is at or slightly behind Trump in recent polls, will portray his Republican rival as a threat to the nation in a speech near Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, a historic site in the U.S. War of Independence.
The president was scheduled to deliver his speech on Saturday, three years to the day after the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol by supporters of Donald Trump trying to prevent the certification of Joe Biden's victory, but the date was moved up to Friday due to a storm forecast.
But the attack on the Capitol remains controversial in the United States: A quarter of Americans believe, without evidence, that the FBI was behind it, according to a Washington Post and University of Maryland poll released this week.
“Three years after the January 6 attack, Republicans are more sympathetic to those who stormed the Capitol and more willing to absolve Donald Trump of any responsibility than they were in 2021,” the newspaper writes.
Efforts to boost the campaign of Mr. Biden, who likes to portray himself as a defender of democracy, continue Monday with a trip to a church in South Carolina where a white supremacist fatally shot nine African Americans in 2015.
“Increased threat”
Democratic campaign manager Julie Chavez Rodriguez said Joe Biden's campaign speech four years ago about waging a “battle for the soul of America” is more relevant than ever.
“The threat that Donald Trump posed to American democracy in 2020 has only intensified,” she said in a statement.
The locations chosen by Joe Biden for his speeches are symbolic: the first, Valley Forge, was the place where George Washington, the first President of the United States, gathered the American forces fighting the British Empire almost 250 years ago.
“We chose Valley Forge because George Washington united the colonies there,” said deputy campaign manager Quentin Fulks. “Then he became president and laid the foundation for the peaceful transition of power – something that Donald Trump and the Republicans rejected.”
This desire to speed up Mr. Biden's campaign comes amid criticism from some Democrats who believe it started too slowly.
The president failed to convince voters that despite favorable numbers, the economy was improving and many Americans were still suffering from high food and housing costs.
“Biden would lose”
Other thorns in the Democrat's side include immigration and the Mexican border conundrum, support for Israel's war against Hamas that divides his party, or even Congress blocking his request for additional funding from Ukraine.
Mr Biden's refusal to mention Donald Trump's numerous legal cases, lest he appear to be influencing the justice system, also deprived him of one of his most important weapons against the Republican billionaire.
But Joe Biden's first flaw remains his age. His few slip-ups and speech errors are scrutinized closely.
He has the worst popularity rating for an incumbent president in the month of December before an election.
“If the election were held tomorrow, President Biden would lose,” William Galston, an expert at the Brookings Institution, told AFP.
Mr. Biden's first campaign clip, released on Thursday and airing for the first time on television on Saturday, warns of the “extreme” threat to democracy by broadcasting images of the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.
“It was terrible to see,” White House spokeswoman Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters on Thursday. “The president will continue to speak out and speak out on this.”