WASHINGTON – President Biden is scheduled to travel to Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, on Friday to deliver a speech on the eve of the anniversary of the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection, as his crusade attempts, at the start of an election year, to make a decision, adopt a more competitive attitude toward Donald Trump, and focus the election on the fight for democracy.
Biden will speak near a site where an organization of defense forces amassed to form a coalition to fight for democracy in the 1770s, and where George Washington established his headquarters during the Revolutionary War, to address the central issue of his roughly 250-year-old presidential crusade. . Later.
On Monday, Biden is scheduled to go to Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina, where nine other people were shot and killed by a white supremacist in 2015.
Both occasions, as well as Vice President Harris’ visit to South Carolina on Saturday, signify a reinvigorated crusade by the most likely Democratic candidate, just as Republicans begin their nominating proceedings with the Iowa caucuses on January 15. approval rating, his age, and the party’s lack of election.
Biden had planned to deliver a speech at Valley Forge on Saturday (Jan. 6 anniversary), but his crusade moved the speech to Friday due to the poor weather forecast for the region.
The latest actions and rhetoric suggest that Biden’s campaign, after some uncertainty, is settling on a central message: that American democracy would not survive another Trump presidency. As Biden’s economic successes fail to move the polls, and Biden himself shows reluctance to wholeheartedly embrace an abortion rights message, an emphasis on democracy has risen to the fore.
“Our message is transparent and simple: we are on a crusade as if the fate of our democracy depends on it. Because that’s the way it is,” Biden’s crusader, Julie Chávez Rodríguez, said Tuesday.
The more sensible advisers to Biden’s crusade have laid out several new efforts to start the year, adding classified ads centered on Biden’s speech on Friday and an attempt to illustrate in a starker way the possible choices the electorate will face in November.
Focusing heavily on democracy has several benefits for Biden. This plays into his ability to communicate about the situation in the United States. He takes advantage of the uniqueness of his most likely opponent. And it signals to the electorate that no matter how dissatisfied they are with Biden, Trump will be worse.
So far, Biden’s crusade has struggled to achieve a coherent message for some time, and the coming weeks will tell whether that shift will be more sustainable. Moreover, focusing on the threat of Trump carries a threat if he is not the possible candidate; The former president is currently the Republican Party’s front-runner, and the upcoming election will show whether he can cement that status.
In the meantime, the crusade continues to spread other messages that it believes will resonate. Later this month, for example, Harris will kick off abortion rights with a “reproductive freedom tour” in Wisconsin to mark the anniversary of the landmark Roe v. Wade decision. Wade. . And the president will continue to trumpet his economic successes and legislative victories.
Biden has begun in recent weeks to speak more directly about Trump, albeit at fundraisers that average voters don’t notice. Their crusade chose to convey this message more directly in a symbolic setting on the anniversary of the uprising, to create a contrast.
“On January 6, 2021, we witnessed a very different vision of America, one defined by revenge, retribution and a rebuke of our very democracy,” Rodriguez said. “It was the first time in our nation’s history that a president tried to prevent the peaceful transfer of power.”
Michael Tyler, the campaign’s communications director, highlighted some of Trump’s speeches and his vow to exact revenge on his warring political parties if he wins the 2024 election.
“He promises to rule like a dictator and use the government to exact revenge on his political enemies, while he and his MAGA supporters inspire and applaud political violence across the country,” he said.
Trump campaign advisers Chris LaCivita and Susie Wiles released a memo Tuesday detailing their prospects for the presidential race. They blamed Biden for the criminal charges against Trump and for court rulings noting that Trump is ineligible to run for office, necessarily arguing that he is the current president who poses the greatest risk to the American system.
“Make no mistake: Joe Biden and his allies pose a genuine and pressing risk to our democracy,” they wrote. “In fact, in a way never before seen in our history, they are waging a war against this. “
While most of the comments from Biden’s crusade aides were directed at Trump, who leads by a wide margin in the No. 1 polls, they also pointed the finger at some of the other Republicans in the field.
“The actors of 2024 have made it clear time and time again that they not only accept: they wholeheartedly accept Donald Trump’s anti-democratic and anti-freedom rhetoric and actions,” Rodríguez said.
Some advisers also pointed to what they called Republican efforts to rewrite America’s racial history, with Nikki Haley, the former governor of South Carolina, who cited slavery as a cause of the Civil War, and with Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who replaced his state’s governor. school curriculum.
“They also need to take away our freedom to be informed by banning books, rewriting, and erasing vital swaths of American history, because if they don’t like it, you have no right to read it,” Tyler said. You don’t have to, just take a look at Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis to get their take on American slavery and the Civil War. “
Biden’s vacation to South Carolina is also an effort to address some Democrats’ fears of a shrinking black electorate.
Biden’s team is seeking to wrap Trump’s anti-democratic impulses with the Republicans’ rhetoric on race to portray an opposition party that is mounting an assault on fundamental American values.
“Whether it’s the white supremacists’ attack on historic American Charlottesville, the attack on the nation’s capital on Jan. 6, or a white supremacist who murdered Mother Emanuel fans just nine years ago,” said crusade deputy director Quentin Fulks, “America is concerned “in the face of emerging political violence and we decided to confront it.