Biden attacks Trump for his responsibility in the assault on the Capitol

One day earlier than expected, due to the threat of storms that loom over the East Coast of the United States this weekend, the president, Joe Biden, wanted to take advantage of the third anniversary of the assault on the Capitol on January 6, 2021 to launch a strong message against his predecessor, Donald Trump. “It was one of the worst derelictions of duty by a president in the history of the United States,” he stated at a rally in Blue Bell (Pennsylvania) in reference to those events. Biden has reproached Trump for watching the attack on the Congress headquarters on television without doing anything to prevent it. Furthermore, he has accused her of provoking the assault with his lies.

Biden, who has been greeted with cries of “Four more years!”, tried in the early stages of his presidency to avoid mentioning Donald Trump. If anything, he was talking about his “predecessor.” Now, however, he has decided to enter the fray with direct attacks against what is expected to be his rival in the November presidential elections.

“Trump exhausted all legal avenues at his disposal to annul the 2020 elections. The legal avenue brought him back to the truth, that I won the elections and he was a loser. He had one act left, a desperate act at his disposal, the violence of January 6,” the president stated.

“Trump says he saw a lot of love on January 6th. “The rest of the nation, including law enforcement, saw a lot of hate and violence,” he said, adding that political violence should never take place in the United States. The insurrectionists, he has said, “did not seek to defend the will of the people, they sought to deny the will of the people.” “You cannot be pro-insurrection and pro-American,” he added. “[El 6 de enero] “We almost lost the United States, we almost lost everything,” he stated.

“What has Trump done? “He has called these insurrectionists 'patriots' and has promised to pardon them if he returns to the presidency,” Biden said. The president has criticized Trump for “glorifying” rather than condemning political violence and has underscored the risk that he believes he poses to democracy, a message he has used successfully before.

Biden has said that by “trying to rewrite the events of January 6, Trump is trying to steal history the same way he tried to steal the election.” The president has recalled that in the 2022 legislative elections, voters refused to elect most of the most radical electoral deniers, who rejected Biden's victory in the 2020 elections. And he has said that he hopes to defeat “the electoral denier in boss”. “Trump's assault on democracy is not just part of his past. This is what he is promising for the future. He is not hiding the ball,” he warned, recalling that his rival has spoken of revenge and dictatorship if he returns to power.

“Donald Trump's campaign is about him. Not about the United States. Not about you. Donald Trump's campaign is obsessed with the past, not the future. “He is willing to sacrifice our democracy to come to power,” Biden said. “There is no confusion about who Trump is or what he intends to do,” he added. “We all know who Donald Trump is. The question we have to answer is who are we?

Biden gave his speech in the assembly hall of the Montgomery County Community College, located in Blue Bell (Pennsylvania), about an hour from downtown Philadelphia. The stage was decorated with four white columns with Corinthian capitals and filled with American flags. About 500 people packed the venue. Biden is less of a fan of big rallies than Trump, in part because he doesn't have the same sense of spectacle as Trump.

For his speech, the president has sought the symbolic proximity of Valley Forge, where George Washington established his winter quarters during the American Revolution. But also, Pennsylvania is a decisive state in the presidential race. It is the fifth State, along with Illinois, with the most votes in the electoral college (19). Biden's chances of achieving re-election involve winning Pennsylvania, where he won in 2020 after Trump defeated Hillary Clinton in 2016.

In Pennsylvania, furthermore, Democrats achieved their greatest success in the November 2022 legislative elections, by snatching a Senate seat from the Republicans. The senator elected then, John Fetterman, was acclaimed upon entering Biden's event this Friday. He came with a sweatshirt and a bright yellow hat that he kept inside the assembly hall. With his approximately 2 meters in height and great corpulence, he did not go unnoticed.

At another point in his speech, the president recalled that at his first rally after announcing his candidacy for the presidential election, Trump evoked the assault on the Capitol, playing over the loudspeaker a song by the prisoners from January 6 from jail and projecting on giant screen images of the attack. “Can you believe it?”

Speaking in Iowa on Friday, Trump accused Biden of “abusing George Washington's legacy” to attack him and his supporters, adding his own dire warning about what is at stake in the campaign, saying: “This election is his last.” opportunity to save the United States,” reports the AP agency.

Three years later, the assault on the Capitol continues to mark the political and judicial agenda of the United States. In addition to the two opposing interpretations, between Republicans and Democrats, of what that unprecedented attack meant, January 6 is still very much alive in the courts in different ways. While more than 1,200 defendants are being prosecuted and convicted in most cases, the assault on the Capitol has reached the Supreme Court through three different routes. The judges will have to decide if that was an insurrection that disqualifies Trump from running for election, if he then enjoyed presidential immunity and if the crime of obstruction of an official procedure (for which dozens of assailants have been convicted, and that Trump is accused) is applicable in this case.

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