Joe Biden to confront Donald Trump as a ‘threat to America’

The 81-year-old Democrat will try to fire up his 2024 campaign with a speech near the independence war site of Valley Forge.

Joe Biden lands at Joint Base Andrews in Maryland. Picture: AFP

President Joe Biden will try to fire up his 2024 campaign on Friday (Saturday AEDT) with a 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 Mr 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 independence war site of Valley Forge in Pennsylvania. A looming winter storm forced the speech to be brought forward a day from the third anniversary of the Capitol assault by a pro-Trump mob trying to overturn Mr Biden’s 2020 election win.

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

Campaign manager Julie Chavez Rodriguez said Mr 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.

The venues for Mr 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 as 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.”

The push at the start of 2024 comes after criticism from some Democrats that the Biden campaign has got off to a slow start.

Mr Biden has failed to convince voters that the economy is improving despite favourable numbers, with Americans saying they are still suffering from high food and housing costs. Migration across the Mexican border remains a headache, there is division in his party over his support for Israel’s war on Hamas, and congress is blocking his bid for more funds for Ukraine.

Mr Biden’s refusal to mention Mr Trump’s multiple criminal cases, in order to avoid the appearance of influencing the judiciary, has also deprived him of one of his most potent weapons. But perhaps Mr Biden’s biggest vulnerability is his age: as America’s oldest-ever president, he has suffered a series of trips and verbal slips.

He lags behind Mr Trump, the man he beat in 2020, in a series of polls, and also has the worst approval rating of any modern president in the December before an election. “If the election were held tomorrow, President Biden would lose,” said William Galston, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.

Yet the Pennsylvania and South Carolina speeches show the Biden campaign will now portray the race as a straight choice between him and the twice-impeached former president. The campaign is already treating Mr Trump as the presumptive challenger despite the fact the battle for the Republican nomination doesn’t even get under way until the Iowa caucuses on January 15.

Democrats are also targeting Mr Trump on issues such as abortion access and healthcare.

Mr Biden’s first TV ad of the year, meanwhile, warns of an “extremist” threat to democracy, featuring images of the Capitol attack and dramatic music. The ad, entitled “Cause”, will get its first network showing on Saturday. “All of us are being asked right now: What will we do to maintain our democracy?” Mr Biden says in a passage lifted from a speech he gave in Arizona last year.

“There’s something dangerous happening in America. There’s an extremist movement that does not share the basic beliefs in our democracy,” says the ad, released early on social media.

AFP