President Joe Biden will shift his focus to the 2024 election with a pair of speeches, taking aim at former President Donald Trump and Nikki Haley, his Republican challengers.
The White House announced Wednesday morning that Biden will mark the third anniversary of the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol by delivering remarks near Valley Forge in Pennsylvania, a Revolutionary War site.
Biden’s re-election campaign says the President will take aim at Trump, the Republican frontrunner, as a threat to democracy. The speech is intended to frame the 2024 presidential election as a fight for democracy.
The President will then travel on Monday to Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina, Haley’s home state, with a speech focused on the rising threats of political violence.
“When Joe Biden ran for president four years ago, he said we are in a ‘battle for the soul of America,’ and as we look towards November 2024, we still are,” Biden campaign manager Julie Chavez Rodriguez told reporters.
“The threat that Donald Trump posed in 2020 to American democracy has only grown more dire in the years since,” Chavez Rodriguez added. “The choice for the American people in November 2024 will be about protecting our democracy and every American’s fundamental freedoms.”
The news comes just two weeks before the first Republican presidential primary contest in Iowa, where Trump maintains a healthy lead over Haley and Florida governor Ron DeSantis in the polls.
Valley Forge, near Philadelphia, was a location picked for its symbolism, where George Washington staged American troops during the Revolutionary War. While the campaign plans to use the setting to cast Trump as a threat to democracy, it will also use it to go after Haley, who drew criticism last week for failing to list slavery as the cause of the American Civil War.
Biden speaking in Charleston on Monday presents an opportunity for the President to shore up his support among African American voters, a key voting bloc to his 2020 victory. Recent polls have showed support among Blacks has reduced due to frustration over Biden’s progress on police reforms and gun control.
The Trump campaign on Tuesday released its memo outlining its vision for the presidential race, planning to blame Biden for Trump’s legal indictments, and for judicial decisions that have declared Trump ineligible for the ballot.
“Please make no mistake: Joe Biden and his allies are a real and compelling threat to our Democracy,” they wrote. “In fact, in a way never seen before in our history, they are waging a war against it.”
Vice President Kamala Harris will also travel to South Carolina on Saturday and again on Martin Luther King Jr. Day later this month.
