Biden will start the year at sites of national trauma to warn about dire stakes of the 2024 election

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Joe Biden is starting the campaign year by evoking the Revolutionary War to mark the third anniversary of the deadly insurrection at the U.S. Capitol and visiting the South Carolina church where a white gunman massacred Black parishioners — seeking to present in the starkest possible terms an election he argues could determine the fate of American democracy.

On Saturday, Biden will travel to near Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, where George Washington and the Continental Army spent a bleak winter nearly 250 years ago. There, he’ll decry former President Donald Trump for the riot by a mob of his supporters who overran the Capitol in an attempt to overturn the 2020 presidential election.

Two days later, the president will visit Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, where nine people were shot and killed in a June 2015 white supremacist attack.

Biden’s kicking off 2024 by delving into some of the country’s darkest moments rather than an upbeat affirmation of his record is meant to clarify for voters what his team sees as the stakes of November’s election. During both events, he will characterize his predecessor as a serious threat to the nation’s founding principles, arguing that Trump — who has built a commanding early lead in the Republican presidential primary — will seek to undermine U.S. democracy should he win a second term.

“We are running a campaign like the fate of our democracy depends on it, because it does,” Biden reelection campaign manager Julie Chavez Rodriguez said on a conference call with reporters.

Trump, who faces 91 criminal charges stemming from his efforts to overturn his loss to Biden and three other felony cases, argues that Biden and top Democrats are themselves seeking