Biden Kick Starts His 2024 Campaign with Speech Targeting Trump

AFP/APP

Washington: President Joe Biden will try to fire up his 2024 campaign Friday with a major speech warning that democracy is at risk from Donald Trump, three years after the January 6 US Capitol attack.

Either trailing or neck and neck with Trump in recent polls, the 81-year-old Democrat will frame his likely Republican rival as a threat to the nation in an address near the historic US independence war site of Valley Forge in Pennsylvania.

A looming winter storm forced the speech to be brought forward a day from Saturday, the third anniversary of the Capitol assault by a pro-Trump mob trying to overturn Biden’s 2020 election win.

The effort to boost Biden’s faltering campaign by painting him as a defender of democracy will continue Monday when he visits a South Carolina church where a white supremacist shot nine black parishioners in 2015.

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Campaign manager Julie Chavez Rodriguez said Biden’s election pitch four years ago that he was leading a “battle for the soul of America” was more relevant than ever.

“The threat Donald Trump posed in 2020 to American democracy has only grown more dire in the years since,” she said in a statement.

The venues for Biden’s first speeches of 2024 are deliberately symbolic, especially the first, at a school near Valley Forge, where George Washington, the first US president, regrouped American forces fighting their British colonial rulers nearly 250 years ago.

“We chose Valley Forge because George Washington united the colonies there,” said principal deputy campaign manager Quentin Fulks.

“Then he became president and set the precedent for the peaceful transition of power—something that Donald Trump and Republicans refused to do.”