Biden to jump-start 2024 campaign with focus on fight for democracy

Ailing in opinion polls, Joe Biden will aim to jump-start his re-election campaign in the coming week with events designed to symbolise the fight for democracy and racial justice against Donald Trump.

The Biden-Harris campaign announced the plans in a conference call with reporters that mentioned Trump by name 28 times in just 24 minutes, a sign of its determination to draw a sharp contrast between the US president and his likely Republican challenger.

On Saturday Biden will deliver a major address laying out the stakes of the election at Valley Forge, near Philadelphia, the site of a 1777-1778 winter encampment of the Continental Army led by George Washington during the American revolutionary war.

It was at Valley Forge that a disorganised alliance of colonial militias was transformed into a cohesive coalition united in the battle for democracy, the Biden-Harris campaign told reporters, noting that Washington became president but then relinquished power.

“There the president will make the case directly that democracy and freedom – two powerful ideas that united the 13 colonies and that generations throughout our nation’s history have fought and died for a stone’s throw from where he’ll be Saturday – remain central to the fight we’re in today,” said the principal deputy campaign manager, Quentin Fulks.

Then, on Monday, Biden will speak at Mother Emanuel AME church in Charleston, South Carolina, where in 2015 nine African American worshippers were killed by a white supremacist while they were praying at the end of Bible study.

Fulks described it as “a historic venue that embodies the stakes of our nation at this moment because whether it is white supremacists descending on the historic American city or Charlottesville, the