Washington:
A divided country will experience an ominous split-screen moment on Thursday as President Joe Biden uses the anniversary of the January 6 attack on Congress to warn of threats to American democracy and Donald Trump goes live with his conspiracy theories.
A year after a mob of Trump supporters marched into Congress to try to prevent lawmakers from certifying Biden’s presidential election victory, political wounds are far from healed.
Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris will reportedly speak from the Capitol, the setting during the turmoil of near-unbelievable scenes as Trump supporters battled past police to invade the heart of American democracy.
As a veteran politician who came out of retirement to assume the authoritarian Trump presidency, Biden has often warned during his first year in the White House about an “existential” threat to political freedoms that most Americans have until now taken for granted. assumed.
His speech — part of a series of events about what Biden’s chief ally, Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, says will be a “difficult day” — will take that warning to a new level.
But as Congress holds a prayer vigil for what Biden has called “a dark moment,” Trump will hold a news conference from his luxury property in Mar-a-Lago, Florida.
His message is also easy to predict. Despite losing more than seven million votes to Biden, and despite losing multiple judicial challenges across the country, Trump continues to make wild claims that the 2020 election has been stolen.
And the allegations are just the most incendiary element of a broader attack on Biden on everything from immigration to Covid-19, all of which amounts to what looks very similar to an undisclosed attempt to take back power in 2024.
It’s a campaign that Carl Tobias, a professor at the University of Richmond School of Law, calls “unprecedented in American history.”
“No former president has tried to do so much to discredit his successor and the democratic process,” Tobias said.
– What can Biden do? –
As ridiculous as the election conspiracy theory may be — a federal judge in Pennsylvania ruled Trump’s case “tense” and “speculative” — it is believed to be true by millions of Americans.
Polls consistently show that about 70 percent of Republicans believe Biden was illegally elected.
A new Washington Post-University of Maryland poll puts this number at 58 percent. However, the same poll found that 40 percent of Republicans, compared to 23 percent of Democrats, believe that violence against the government is sometimes justified.
Fighting what Trump, the master burner, popularizes as “the steal” has become a political ideology in its own right, with nearly all Republican lawmakers either squirming to avoid criticizing what happened on January 6 or actively defending the attack.
Lara Brown, director of the Graduate School of Political Management at George Washington University, said the combination of political swindlers seeking to get into Trump’s good books and the masses of voters misled into believing what they’re being told is a significant strength.
“What’s so frightening about where we are now is not only that these are elite attacks, but they are fueled by a grassroots movement,” she said.
“It wasn’t just far-right win groups that had organized” on Jan. 6, she said. “It was average, everyday Americans who had accepted this whole idea.”
It’s unclear what Biden can do to change these dynamics.
Political scientist and Democratic pollster Rachel Bitecofer urged Biden to take a more aggressive approach to Trump, rather than pretending that the man who called press secretary Jen Psaki “the former man” no longer matters.
Biden “is not commemorating an event that ended. He is commemorating the event that is underway and threatens to worsen,” she said.
“There is a real reluctance to accept how virulent the right is to come after democracy here.”
However, Brown said Biden has little wiggle room because a direct attack on Trump risks looking like a “political witch hunt” — exactly what the former president claims in his conspiracy theories.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by DailyExpertNews staff and has been published from a syndicated feed.)