U.S cannot accept that “political violence becomes the norm” is the warning that the country’s president, Joe Biden, did this Thursday to his compatriots, a year after hundreds of supporters of former president Donald Trump stormed the Capitol.
(Read here: Biden will hold Trump responsible for the assault on the Capitol)
Happening Now: President Biden delivers remarks to mark one year since the January 6th deadly assault on the Capitol. https://t.co/bWNiMaYSyp
– The White House (@WhiteHouse) January 6, 2022
“We have to decide today which nation we are going to be. Are we going to be a nation that accepts political violence as the norm? Are we going to be a nation that allows partisan officials to override the will legally expressed by the people? Are we going to be one nation that does not live in the light of truth, but in the shadow of lies? “, said the president.
“We cannot afford to become that kind of nation,” he said on the first anniversary of the violent takeover of Congress by Trump supporters in order to prevent the certification of Biden’s electoral victory.
In fact, the current president accused Trump of “having tried to prevent a peaceful transfer of power” and of “creating a web of lies.” Biden accuses Trump of having created a “web of lies” to the detriment of the national interest.
“For the first time in our history, a president not only lost the election; he tried to prevent the peaceful handover of power when a violent mob stormed the Capitol,” Biden said in a speech marking the first anniversary of the assault on Congress. “It was not a group of tourists. It was an armed insurrection,” he added.
“His wounded ego matters more to him than our democracy and our Constitution. He cannot accept that he lost,” he added after directly mentioning the former president.
The 79-year-old Democrat spoke at 9 am in the imposing “Statues Room” of the Capitol, seat of the United States Congress, in the company of the vice president, Kamala harris.
(Also: Assault on the Capitol: A Year of America’s Worst Democratic Crisis)
Before Biden began his speech, Harris called on Americans to “unite” in defense of the country’s democracy.
A year ago, in that same place, the supporters of Donald trump, leaving America and the world dumbfounded. A mob stormed the venerable building in an attempt to prevent congressmen from certifying Biden’s victory in the election.
The president chose for a long time to look down on his predecessor, refusing, for example, to name him in public. But this time, the US president decided to change strategy and publicly held responsibility for Trump’s “private responsibility” in this episode of violence.
Biden “sees January 6 as a tragic culmination of what four years of Trump’s presidency have done to this country,” his spokesperson Jen Psaki previously claimed, breaking the White House’s most cautious line so far. who even avoids mentioning the former president by name.
Republicans seem to favor a low profile. The head of the Conservatives in the Senate, Mitch McConnell, will attend a funeral in the south of the country, far from the commemorations in Washington.
Trump himself canceled a planned press conference from his Florida mansion. The former Republican president, who does not usually back down, has perhaps considered that speaking on this day would be an excessive provocation. Or maybe he changed his mind because a parliamentary investigation into the instigators of the violence on Capitol Hill is getting closer to him every day, leaving him on the ropes.
(It may interest you: The investigation of the assault on the US Capitol continues to grow)
‘The nation teeters on the brink of an abyss’
But for that reason he did not moderate his speech. On Tuesday he branded the fraud that, he claims without proof, marred the 2020 presidential elections as a “crime of the century”. And this theory is gaining ground, well beyond the angry mob of January 6, 2021.
A poll by information site Axios estimates that only 55 percent of Americans are convinced that Democrat Biden, who defeated Trump by seven million votes, was elected according to the rules.
“Our great nation teeters on the brink of an ever-widening abyss. Without immediate action, we really run the risk of civil war and the loss of our beloved democracy,” he warned in the newspaper. The New York Times former President Jimmy Carter, who has become a moral authority for many Americans.
(Also: Trump cancels anniversary press conference on Capitol storming)
To this deeply divided nation, Biden wants to propose a route to strengthen American democracy. The president is trying to adopt bills on minority access to the right to vote.
Biden will travel to the southern state of Georgia on Tuesday, emblematic of past and present civil rights battles, to denounce “perverse attempts to strip honest citizens of their fundamental freedoms,” the White House reported.
But in the face of conservative southern states that multiply laws that complicate access to the polls for African Americans and Latinos, Joe Biden’s room for maneuver is limited.
Not only do Democrats control Congress by a slim margin, but the president’s popularity has worn off after nearly a year in the White House.
A wear that is due to an accumulation of factors: fed up with a new wave of the covid-19 pandemic, persistent inflation and the memory of a chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan. According to the FiveThirtyEight site, just over 43 percent of Americans trust him to lead the world’s leading power.
AFP
More news
– What happened to the case against former Governor Andrew Cuomo?
– At least 13 dead, including 7 children, in a fire in Philadelphia
.
#Biden #blames #Trump #assault #anniversary #seizure #Capitol