President Biden kicked off the election year with his harshest denunciation yet of his likely opponent on Friday, casting Donald Trump as a liar, a loser, and a dangerous opponent of democracy. "There's no confusion about who Trump is or what he intends to do," Biden said in a speech delivered in Pennsylvania, the New York Times reports. "The question is: Who are we?" He spoke near Valley Forge National Historical Park, which commemorates the Revolutionary War at a spot where Gen. George Washington led troops. "Today we're here to answer the most important of questions: Is democracy still America's sacred cause?" Biden said. "It's what the 2024 election is all about."
Saturday is the third anniversary of the attack on the US Capitol, and Biden brought up Trump's refusal to take responsibility for the riot and cast it as harmless. "Trump is trying to steal history, the same way he tried to steal the election," the president said. "It was on television. We saw it with our own eyes." Of Trump's false claims of victory in 2020, Biden said: "I won the election. And he was a loser." The half-hour speech was more personal and unsparing than usual for Biden; he used Trump's name at least 44 times by the Washington Post's count. At one point, Biden seemed to stop just short of cursing him.
"Trump is now promising a full-scale campaign of revenge and retribution, his words, for some years to come," Biden said. He contrasted Trump's attempts to stay in office with the first president's insistence on giving it up. "George Washington was at the height of his power, having just defeated the most powerful empire on Earth," Biden said. "He could have held onto that power as long as he wanted. … But that wasn't the America he and the troops at Valley Forge had fought for." (More President Biden 2024 stories.)
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