By Trevor Hunnicutt
WASHINGTON (Reuters) -President Joe Biden on Friday will mark three years since the Jan. 6 attacks on the U.S. Capitol with a warning to voters that Republican Donald Trump, his likely 2024 election opponent, is a threat to the country’s standing as a free democracy.
Trump, president from 2017 to 2021, who is leading the field for the Republican nomination for president, contested his defeat in the 2020 election, prompting thousands of his supporters to attack the U.S Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. The failed bid to stop formal certification of the result killed five people and injured dozens of police officers.
Speaking near George Washington’s Revolutionary War-era winter headquarters in Pennsylvania, Biden, a Democrat, will kick off his 2024 campaign with the pitch that he represents a continuation of the style of democratic government Americans have grown up with and that a vote for Trump would be a leap into a dark, uncharted future.
Biden was scheduled to deliver his remarks a day before the Jan. 6 anniversary to avoid a forecast winter storm.
As president, Biden has warned about the future of U.S. democracy before, including on the first anniversary of Jan. 6, and in a fiery Sept. 2022 speech where he called Trump and his Republican followers extremists who threatened to take the country backward.
Republicans challenging Trump in the 2024 nominating contest have mostly steered clear of criticizing Trump’s actions on that day, as opinion polls show Republican voters are less likely to blame Trump for his actions on Jan. 6 than they were three years ago.
Whether Biden’s Friday speech will make an impact 10 months before Election Day – in a politically polarized country where voters get news and information from wildly different sources – remains to be seen.
The 2024 race is expected to be closely contested, and Biden aides see Pennsylvania, home to Biden’s Scranton birthplace, as a must-win state. He won in 2020 with 50.01% of the vote. In 2016, Trump won Pennsylvania with 48.58% of the vote.
Biden’s arguments have done little to soothe his own supporters’ concerns about the state of the economy or his age, 81.
Trump, 77, holds a marginal, two-point lead in a head-to-head matchup with Biden, 38% to 36%, with 26% of respondents saying they were unsure or might vote for someone else, according to the latest Reuters/Ipsos poll.
Biden prepared for the long-planned speech by inviting a group of historians and scholars to the White House for a wide-ranging conversation on the threats to American democracy.
The audience is expected to include people directly affected by “election denialism and the events of Jan. 6,” according to a person familiar with the planning of the speech.
TRUMP ON THE TRAIL
Trump has portrayed the 2024 race in similarly existential terms, calling his criminal trials a persecution and describing Biden as a crook.
Despite facing state and federal charges over election interference, Trump in recent months has teased acting as a dictator on “day one” and pledged to investigate, incarcerate and otherwise take revenge on his political opponents.
The Republican frontrunner is expected to spend Saturday’s anniversary campaigning with rallies in Iowa, which hosts the first Republican nominating contest of the presidential race on Jan. 15. His leading opponents have largely avoided raising the Jan. 6 attack or Trump’s role in it.
Lawyers for Trump have disputed that he engaged in insurrection and argued that his remarks to supporters on the day of the 2021 riot were protected by his constitutional right to free speech.
Authorities are seeking information about more than 80 people who committed violence at the Capitol and remain unidentified, Matthew Graves, the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, told reporters on Thursday. Graves’ office has overseen the prosecution of more than 1,200 people so far accused of committing crimes during the attack.
Graves said authorities have two more years to charge rioters before the statute of limitations expires.
“Our democracy is fragile,” he told reporters during a briefing on the investigation into the attack. “We cannot replace votes and deliberation with violence and intimidation.”
JOBS, ECONOMY, DEMOCRACY
In 2024, Biden aides plan to pair the threat-to-democracy argument with more bread-and-butter topics about U.S. job growth, falling inflation, healthcare, gun violence and abortion rights, hoping to reassemble the coalition of 81 million voters that won Biden the White House in 2020, with his party then in control of both houses of Congress.
Democrats in the 2022 midterm elections lost control of the House of Representatives to Republicans, but maintained control of the Senate with a slim margin.
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(Reporting by Trevor Hunnicutt; Additional reporting by Andrew Goudsward; Editing by Leslie Adler and Jonathan Oatis)
