Biden to Mark Jan. 6 Anniversary Near Valley Forge

President Joe Biden will mark the third anniversary of the Jan. 6 Capitol riot with a speech near Valley Forge, where he’ll make the case that American democracy and freedoms are at stake in the 2024 presidential election.

The Biden reelection campaign says former President Donald Trump, Biden’s likely GOP opponent, is running a campaign of “revenge and retribution” and that the danger he poses to democracy and fundamental freedoms is even more dire now than during the 2020 election. 

“We are running a campaign like the fate of our democracy depends on it, because it does,” said Biden-Harris Campaign Manager Julie Chavez Rodriguez.

Michael Tyler, the campaign's communication director, added, "As we saw on January 6, three years ago, Donald Trump and his MAGA apostles — including many of his primary opponents — have no interest in preserving our democracy. They only care about power."

The campaign intends to bring those messages to voters who will decide the election, starting with Biden’s trip near Valley Forge, a setting that gives Biden both a symbolic backdrop harkening back to the colonists’ fight for democracy and time in Pennsylvania, a state crucial to his reelection campaign.

He’ll travel on Monday to South Carolina, where he’ll deliver remarks at the Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, the scene of a racially targeted mass shooting in 2015 that killed nine people. South Carolina was critical to Biden’s victory in the 2020 Democratic presidential primary.

“Whether it is white supremacists descending on historic American city of Charlottesville, the assault on our nation's capitol on January 6, or white supremacist murdering churchgoers at Mother Emanuel nearly nine years ago, America is worried about the rise in political violence and determined to stand against it,” said Principal Deputy Campaign Manager Quentin Fulks.

Biden’s campaign stops occur as Trump faces legal challenges to his eligibility to hold the presidency under the Constitution’s insurrection clause. Colorado and Maine have both issued rulings banning Trump from the ballots, although he appealed the Maine decision and is expected to appeal Colorado's.

Three years since the deadly attack at the Capitol, 37% of those surveyed in a Washington Post-University of Maryland poll said Trump bears “a great deal” of responsibility and 16% said a “good amount.” The poll also found that more than a third of Americans believe Biden’s election was illegitimate, despite state audits and a lack of evidence.

As president, Biden has traveled numerous times to Pennsylvania, one of the key states that he carried in 2020 but can’t take for granted in 2024. He beat Trump there in 2020 by a margin of just over a percentage point, after Trump won there in 2016 by an even narrower margin.

Philadelphia was the site of Biden’s 2020 campaign headquarters and his first campaign rally of his reelection campaign in April. It was also where he delivered remarks from Independence Hall ahead of the 2022 midterm elections, warning against “extremism” from Donald Trump and MAGA Republicans that threatens democracy and the “MAGA forces” that  are determined to take the country backwards.

“They look at the mob that stormed the United States Capitol on January 6th — brutally attacking law enforcement — not as insurrectionists who placed a dagger to the throat of our democracy, but they look at them as patriots,” he said then. “And they see their MAGA failure to stop a peaceful transfer of power after the 2020 election as preparation for the 2022 and 2024 elections.”

Biden’s biggest strength heading into the November 2024 election is that “he represents calm in an increasingly chaotic Trump world,” said Brad Bannon, a Democratic pollster and consultant. “It really is about democracy. Trump just sounds more dictatorial all the time.” 

Democrats have been urging voters to take Trump at his word when he says he wants to be a dictator for a day, a comment he later said was a joke.

In a Christmas Day message, Trump called for his enemies to “ROT IN HELL.” Last week, he shared a word cloud with the words "revenge" and "dictatorship" to describe a potential second presidency.