U.S cannot accept that “political violence becomes the norm” is the warning that the country’s president, Joe Biden, will launch his compatriots on Thursday, 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)
“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 the truth, but in the shadow of the lie? “Biden will ask himself, according to an excerpt from the speech that the US president will deliver to commemorate the events of January 6, 2021.
“We cannot afford to become that kind of nation,” he will say in this speech on the first anniversary of the violent takeover of Congress by Trump supporters in order to prevent the certification of Biden’s electoral victory.
The 79-year-old Democrat will speak 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)
A year ago, in this 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 has long chosen to look down on his predecessor, refusing, for example, to name him in public. But this time, the US president has decided to change his strategy and will speak publicly of Trump’s “particular responsibility” in this episode of violence, as the White House has already made known.
Biden “sees January 6 as a tragic culmination of what four years of Trump’s presidency have done to this country,” said his spokesperson, Jen Psaki, breaking the White House’s most cautious line so far, which He 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
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