Donald Trump's campaign is trying to flip the script on Joe Biden, arguing that the president is the “real” threat to democracy.
The charges come as Biden prepares to kick off his 2024 campaign with a major speech in Philadelphia on the anniversary of the Jan. 6 insurrection and as Trump fights to regain access to presidential elections in Colorado and Maine.
“Joe Biden and his allies pose a real and compelling threat to our democracy. In fact, in a way never before seen in our history, they are waging a war against it,” Trump campaign advisers Chris LaCivita and Susie Wiles argued in a memo on Tuesday.
Donald Trump's campaign seeks to flip Joe Biden's script as 2024 battle heats up
The two also point to decisions by the Colorado Supreme Court and Maine's secretary of state to bar Trump from voting in those states in 2024, arguing that this is being done in case federal charges against the former president does not “deliver the results they hoped for.”
“Never in American history have these types of tactics been used by an opposition party,” they write.
The former president has long claimed that the various federal lawsuits against him are a witch hunt by Democrats using the government against him. Trump is facing federal charges related to his actions during the Jan. 6 election and his efforts to overturn the 2020 election results. Georgia and New York are pursuing state charges against him.
But Trump's latest attack has officially begun the presidential campaign year.
Biden plans to start his pitch to voters by appealing to the fight to save democracy, which has long been a talking point in his campaign.
He will travel to Philadelphia on Saturday to invoke the Revolutionary War and on Monday he will visit the South Carolina church where a white gunman massacred black parishioners.
At both events, he will highlight the dark times in American history and warn that Trump poses a huge threat to the principles on which the country was founded.
On Saturday, the third anniversary of the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the Capitol, Biden will deliver a speech near Valley Forge, the historic Revolutionary War site that sheltered George Washington and the Continental Army nearly 250 years ago.
“The President will directly emphasize that democracy and freedom, two powerful ideas that united the thirteen colonies and that generations in our country's history have fought and died just steps from where he will be on Saturday, remain central to the struggle we face.” will carry. “are here today,” said Quentin Fulks, Biden's deputy campaign manager.
On Monday, Biden will speak at Mother Emanuel AME Church, the historically black church in Charleston where nine people were killed after a gunman opened fire on a Bible study group in 2015.
“Whether it is white supremacists descending on a historic American city of Charlottesville, the attack on our nation's capital on January 6, or a white supremacist killing churchgoers at Mother Emanuel nearly nine years ago, America is concerned about the increase in political violence and is determined to oppose it,” Fulks noted.
Joe Biden will use the third anniversary of the January 6 insurrection to attack Donald Trump
Biden will speak Monday at Mother Emanuel AME Church, the historically black church in Charleston (above) where nine people were killed after a gunman opened fire on a Bible study group in 2015.
The United States Capitol can be seen behind the Washington Monument around sunrise
While Biden speaks in those states, Trump will campaign hard in Iowa, where the first caucuses in the Republican presidential nomination contest will take place on January 15.
Trump announced eight rallies to be held this Friday and Saturday, and the weekend just before the Iowa caucuses.
Biden, meanwhile, will double down on his argument that the former president is a threat to democracy. In his campaign, Trump, who has a huge lead in the polls for the Republican nomination, is increasingly seen as the president's likely opponent in the general election.
Biden has gone after Trump in fundraising behind closed doors, criticizing him for his invocation of Nazi-style statements and accusing him of being the reason Roe vs. Wade was overturned, rolling back abortion rights in many states.
Now the president appears to be preparing to make these arguments more forcefully and publicly.
“The threat that Donald Trump posed to American democracy in 2020 has only grown in the years since,” said Biden campaign manager Julie Chávez Rodríguez.
'Our message is clear and simple. We are campaigning as if the fate of our democracy depends on it. Because it is.'
However, Trump leads Biden in the polls. The margin is small, but Trump's lead is stable. In the Polling average from RealClearPolitics in the general election, Trump has a two-point lead.
More worrying, Trump defeated Biden in two key voter groups, giving him an overall lead in the presidential race, the first new poll of 2024 showed.
Trump leads Biden among Hispanic voters by five points, 39%-34%, and among younger voters by three points, 37%-34%, according to a USA TODAY/Suffolk University survey.
Biden won both voting groups in the 2020 presidential contest, where he defeated Trump and won the White House. Monday's poll also shows Biden losing support among black voters, another key voting bloc.
He now has the support of just 63% of Black voters, a group he carried by as much as 87% in 2020.
The president's trip to South Carolina on Monday will be his fourth as president as he tries to court the all-important voting bloc.