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President Joe Biden will use the anniversary of the January 6 attack on Congress to warn of risks to US democracy, while Donald Trump goes live with his conspiracy theories.
One year after a crowd of Trump supporters stormed Congress in an attempt to prevent lawmakers from acknowledging Biden’s victory in the presidential election, political scars are still fresh.
Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris are expected to speak from inside the Capitol, which was the scene of nearly unbelievable images during the rioting as Trump supporters pushed their way past police and into the heart of US democracy.
Biden, a senior politician who stepped out of retirement to take on Trump’s authoritarian leadership, has repeatedly warned during his first year in the White House of a “existential” threat to political freedoms that most Americans had taken for granted.
His address, which is one of a sequence of events on what Democratic Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi has described as a “tough day,” is poised to amp up that warning.
While Congress holds a prayer vigil for what Vice President Joe Biden has described as a “sad period,” Trump will hold a press conference from his opulent resort in Mar-a-Lago, Florida.
It’s also easy to guess what he’ll say. Despite losing by more than seven million votes to Biden and losing many legal battles around the country, Trump continues to make outrageous assertions that the 2020 election will be rigged.
And the claims are merely the most inflammatory part of a bigger attack on Biden that includes everything from immigration to Covid-19, all of which points to an as-yet unannounced campaign to reclaim power in 2024.
A lecturer at the University of Richmond School of Law, Carl Tobias, describes the effort as “unique in US history.”
What can Biden do in this situation?
Regardless matter how ridiculous the electoral conspiracy idea is — one federal court in Pennsylvania called Trump’s case “strained” and “speculative” — millions of Americans believe it to be true.
According to polls, almost 70% of Republicans believe Biden was elected illegally.
According to a new Washington Post-University of Maryland poll, this figure is 58 percent. However, 40 percent of Republicans, compared to 23 percent of Democrats, say violence against the government is justifiable on occasion, according to the same poll.
Fighting what Trump, the master brander, refers to as “the Steal,” has become a political philosophy in and of itself, with nearly all Republican legislators either scrambling to avoid criticising the attack on January 6 — or actively defending it.
Lara Brown, head of George Washington University’s Graduate School of Political Management, said the combination of political operatives seeking to curry favour with Trump and the millions of voters duped into believing what they’re told amounts to a significant power.
“What’s so terrifying about where we are right now is that these aren’t simply elite attacks; they’re being driven by a grass-roots movement,” she said.
“On January 6, it wasn’t simply far-right win organisations that had organised,” she said. “It was ordinary Americans who got into this whole concept.”
Rachel Bitecofer, a political scientist and Democratic pollster, pushed Biden to go after Trump more aggressively rather than pretending that “the former guy,” as Press Secretary Jen Psaki has referred to him, is no longer relevant.
Biden is a vice president of the United States “isn’t celebrating a past event. He’s commemorating an ongoing incident that threatens to worsen “she explained.
“There’s a tremendous reluctance to acknowledge how ferocious the right is in its assault on democracy here.”
Brown, on the other hand, believes Biden has limited room for manoeuvring since a direct attack on Trump risks appearing as a “political witch hunt,” which is precisely what the former president argues in his conspiracy theories.
