Biden to speak at Valley Forge to mark 3 years since Jan. 6 Capitol riot

President Joe Biden plans to mark three years since the 2021 Capitol riot with a speech at Valley Forge, where George Washington staged American troops during the Revolutionary War.

His remarks in Pennsylvania on Saturday are intended to frame the 2024 presidential election as a fight for democracy. Mr. Biden's reelection campaign said he will also be making a speech next week at the Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina, the site of the 2015 shooting by a white supremacist. There, Mr. Biden aims to draw a contrast with former President Donald Trump and the "anti-freedom agenda" of his "[Make America Great Again] apostles," the Biden campaign says.

"When Joe Biden ran for president four years ago, he said we are in a 'battle for the soul of America,' and as we look towards November 2024, we still are," Biden campaign manager Julie Chavez Rodriguez said during a campaign strategy briefing on Wednesday.

Trump was the primary focus of the briefing by top Biden campaign officials, who mentioned him more than a dozen times during a session that lasted under 30 minutes. 

"The threat that Donald Trump posed in 2020 to American democracy has only grown more dire in the years since," Chavez Rodriguez said, adding the Biden reelection campaign is being run like the "fate of our democracy depends on it — because it does."

Two weeks before the first Republican presidential primary contest in Iowa, Biden campaign communications director Michael Tyler said if another Republican presidential candidate besides Trump wins the nomination, the candidate will "have done so by hard tacking to the most extreme positions that we have seen in recent American history."

"Obviously, we have Donald Trump out here promising to rule as a dictator on day one, but every last one—[Nikki] Haley, [Ron] DeSantis—they're about extreme abortion bans," Tyler said, in addition to noting Haley's recent campaign trail omission of slavery as a cause of the Civil War.

The Biden campaign did not say if or when the pace of Mr. Biden's campaign trail appearances will pick up, but campaign sources have told CBS News the sitting president's travel will mostly focus on official White House duties until an official Republican presidential nominee emerges.

Campaign officials said the president and Vice President Kamala Harris on Jan. 22 will use the 51st anniversary of the landmark Supreme Court ruling Roe v. Wade, which granted abortion access nationwide until it was struck down in 2022, to make clear that the Biden campaign focus on "freedom" isn't just rhetoric. The campaign also plans to point out book banning, criticize corporate interests and stress the importance of free and fair elections.

 

Bo Erickson

Bo Erickson is a reporter covering the White House for CBS News Digital.

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