It was the speech that marked the start of his real campaign. And an assumed launch of hostilities, 11 months before the presidential election of November 2024. Friday January 5, near Valley Forge in Pennsylvania, a historic site of the American War of Independence, the Democratic president and candidate upon his re-election Joe Biden launched a frontal attack against his rival Donald Trump during a particularly offensive speech, accusing him of using the rhetoric of Nazi Germany, and returning at length to the assault on the Capitol by his supporters on January 6, 2021. “A day forever etched in our memory because it was that day we almost lost America,” he recalled. Donald Trump “talks about the blood of Americans being poisoned (by migrants), using exactly the same language as that used in Nazi Germany,” the 81-year-old lambasted. The current president presented the great favorite of the Republicans as a man “obsessed with the past” and “ready to sacrifice our democracy in order to obtain power”.
Campaign clip and black community vote
Beyond a first charge against his rival – Joe Biden is placed neck and neck or just behind Donald Trump according to the polls – this speech, brought forward a day due to storm, was to give a boost whip to the Democrat’s campaign. The chosen location is symbolic: Valley Forge saw George Washington, future first president of the United States, bring together the American military forces who fought against the British Empire almost 250 years ago.
At the same time, Joe Biden’s team released a first one-minute television spot, warning of the “extreme” threat to democracy by broadcasting images of the attack on the Capitol on January 6, 2021, without ever naming Donald Trump. Entitled “Because”, it is already available on the networks and will be broadcast for the first time on television this Saturday, January 6, exactly three years after the historic event which cost the lives of five people. “Something dangerous is happening in the United States. There is an extremist movement that does not share the fundamental values of our democracy,” Joe Biden says in this video which shows images of pro-Trump signs on Trump Day. invasion of the Capitol, a hangman’s rope brought by rioters, as well as photos of white supremacists carrying torches at a rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017.
A campaign to “save democracy”
To continue his momentum, the president is also expected to deliver a speech in South Carolina this Monday, January 8 at the Mother Emanuel African Methodical Episcopal Church in Charleston. In 2015, white gunman Dylann Roof shot and killed nine black members of the congregation there. A visit that “highlights the campaign’s efforts to strengthen support among black voters,” notes the American political media Politico. And which comes just two days after that of its vice-president Kamala Harris. “We are not going to wait and parachute into these communities at the last minute and ask them for their vote. We are going to win their vote,” assures the deputy campaign director to the English-speaking site, assuring that “voters of color are the ones who have the most at stake in this election. And we need to make sure that every single one of them understands the choice before them.”
During his last campaign in 2020, Joe Biden had already described his duel with Donald Trump as a “battle for the soul of America”. This time, “the president and his team are portraying the 2024 race as a binary choice between him and an authoritarian Donald Trump”, and above all as a fight to safeguard American democracy, analyze the New Yorker. An effective strategy? “In the 2022 and 2023 elections, the Democrats did better than expected after highlighting Republican extremism,” emphasizes the American magazine, “but no president running for re-election can rely exclusively on the toxicity of his opponent”.
Joe Biden’s battles
This sudden boost in the outgoing president’s campaign comes after criticism from some Democrats, who believe that it has been too soft until now. The president is still struggling to convince that the economy is improving despite more favorable than expected employment figures, published this Friday. Other thorns in his side: immigration and the Mexican border puzzle, support for Israel’s war against Hamas which divides his party or even Congress which blocks his request for additional funds from Ukraine. But Joe Biden’s first flaw probably remains his age. He has the worst popularity rating for a sitting president in a December preceding an election.
Joe Biden’s refusal to mention Donald Trump’s multiple legal cases also deprived him of one of his main weapons against the Republican billionaire. Donald Trump is currently facing several trials, including one over the January 6 assault. The US Supreme Court also agreed on Friday to take up the question of Donald Trump’s ineligibility after Colorado took the unprecedented decision to prevent the former president from appearing on the ballot for the Republican primary in this state. Directly involving itself in a highly political matter, the Supreme Court, with a conservative majority, announced that it would examine this case during a hearing on February 8.