Biden to start election year with speech on third anniversary of Capitol attack

Joe Biden will on Friday mark the third anniversary of the deadly January 6 attack on Congress, delivering his first presidential election campaign speech of 2024 at Valley Forge, Pennsylvania – a site replete with historical meaning.

A day before the anniversary, due to forecast bad weather, Biden will speak where George Washington’s army endured another dark moment: the bitter winter of 1777-78, an ordeal key to winning American independence from Britain.

Biden will also speak about January 6 on Monday at the Mother Emanuel AME church in Charleston, South Carolina, where in June 2015 a gunman shot dead nine Black people in an attempt to start a race war.

Donald Trump’s nearest challenger for the Republican nomination, Nikki Haley, was governor of South Carolina at the time and subsequently oversaw the removal of the Confederate battle flag from statehouse grounds.

Haley has since struggled to define her position on the flag and the interests it represented, last week in New Hampshire failing to say slavery caused the civil war.

But the Biden campaign is focusing on Trump, who refused to accept his conclusive defeat in 2020, spreading the lie that he was denied by electoral fraud and ultimately encouraging supporters to attempt to stop certification of Biden’s win by Congress.

The attack on the Capitol delayed certification but the process was completed in the early hours of 7 January. Biden was inaugurated two weeks later.

On Thursday, the Biden campaign previewed his Valley Forge speech and released Cause, an ad one adviser said would “set the stakes” for this year’s election.

“I’ve made the preservation of American democracy the central issue of my presidency,” Biden says in the ad, over footage of Americans voting.

But, he