Joe Biden’s speech ahead of the anniversary of the January 6 attack on the Capitol is not only the move his campaign has been waiting to make against Donald Trump, it’s also personal for the president.
One moment, from about a year ago, still plays on a loop in the minds of many people close to Joe Biden. It was the final days before a midterm election that nearly everyone assumed would hobble his presidency. The president was putting the finishing touches on a speech he wanted to give about the imperiled state of American democracy, and the cacophonous second-guessing was coming not just from media critics and Republicans but even from fellow Democrats — including the former top political advisors to both Barack Obama and Bernie Sanders. To this crowd, it was obvious that Biden was missing a chance to talk to undecided or unmotivated voters by not focusing on topics like the economy or crime; to Biden, whose aides still sometimes reminisce about that week’s MSNBC segments and tweets, it was clear the political class was simply missing the moment. In the aftermath of that speech and that election — in which Democrats outperformed expectations, beating dozens of election deniers — the president made no secret of his sense of vindication. Nor has he hidden his conviction that Americans have yet to have their final say over Donald Trump’s January 6 insurrection. In the year since, as his attention has turned more fully to his own re-election campaign, that feeling has only deepened.
It was no surprise to Biden’s closest allies, then, that he wanted to open 2024 answering all the fears about his electoral standing and his slow-and-steady campaign pace by returning to his favorite theme, the one that his senior-most advisers say animates him most when he’s with them in the Oval Office. His speech outside of Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, on Friday represented not just his harshest criticisms yet for Trump — who, Biden noted disbelievingly, has been using language reminiscent of Nazi Germany — but also his clearest articulation yet of his belief that the defense of American democracy is not just righteous and necessary but, as a result, an obvious political winner, too.
“When the attacks of January 6 happened, there was no doubt about the truth. At the time, even Republican members of Congress and Fox News commentators publicly and privately condemned the attack. And as one Republican senator said, Trump’s behavior was embarrassing and humiliating for the country,” Biden recalled. “But now as time has gone on, politics, fear, money have all intervened, and those MAGA voices who know the truth about Trump and January 6 have abandoned the truth and abandoned our democracy. They’ve made their choice. Now the rest of us — Democrats, independents, mainstream Republicans — we have to make our choice. I know mine, and I believe I know America’s.
