WASHINGTON (Fwrd Axis) — President Joe Biden will blame former president Donald Trump for the deadly January 6 attack on the United States Capitol in an address to mark the one-year anniversary on Thursday morning.
Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris will each give remarks at the U.S. Capitol on Thursday morning to commemorate the one-year anniversary of the deadly attack. Biden has criticized Trump by name on only a few occasions during his first year in office and has been reluctant to fuel much of the flames of the former president.
Democrats have privately urged Biden to take on Trump’s falsehoods more directly and position himself as the leader of the movement to stop the assault on American democracy.
“President Biden will lay out the significance of what happened at the Capitol, the singular responsibility President Trump has for the chaos and carnage that we saw,” White House press secretary Jen Psaki said Wednesday at the daily press briefing.
Biden and Harris will give their remarks at Statuary Hall and will set the tone for the rest of the events that will take place later throughout the day.
Harris’ remarks will focus on the events of the day, saying “that the insurrection was not just an assault on our Capitol, but an assault on our freedom and values,” according to a White House official.
“The vice president will outline that the American experiment is being tested and that we must work to secure voting rights, ensure free and fair elections, and safeguard our democracy for generations to come,” the official said in a statement.
Trump had initially planned his own event on the day, a news conference at Mar-a-Lago to counterprogram the events at the U.S. Capitol. However, he released a statement to cancel the event, blasting the “total bias and dishonesty” from the media, and said he would give his speech at a rally in Arizona.
“He [Biden] sees January 6th as a tragic culmination of what those four years under President Trump did to our country,” Psaki said.
The violence at the Capitol resulted in five deaths and several Capitol police officers committing suicide in the weeks that followed. Sergeant Aquilino Gonell spoke to CBS News and said he is still feeling the effects of the deadly attack even one year later.
“Every day for me has been a January 6,” he said. “It’s been hard — emotionally, physically, and financially as well. “The way I sleep, from the way I put my shirt on, the way I take a shower, the physical therapy twice a week, the mental health therapy once a week.”
Gonell is a 16-year veteran of the U.S. Capitol Police and demands action and accountability for those responsible for the violence.
“If we don’t put a deterrent on some of these and hold people accountable for what they did, this could be a recurring thing every four years,” he said.
