Today, President Biden will visit Mother Emanuel Church in Charleston, South Carolina to deliver remarks underscoring the enormous stakes of this election, as Donald Trump and MAGA Republicans wage a campaign determined to undermine American democracy, strip away our personal freedom, and threaten the type of political violence that concerns 83% of Americans and plagued Mother Emanuel Church nearly nine years ago.
The visit to South Carolina comes just days after President Biden’s powerful address near Valley Forge, Pennsylvania to mark three years since the January 6 insurrection and reminded Americans that the hate and vitriol fomented by Donald Trump is antithetical to the values that make America great. During his address today, President Biden will emphasize that it is the job of a president to root out hate and extremism and to bring the nation together – turning horror and tragedy into action and progress.
“This year’s election will determine the fate of American democracy, our freedoms, and whether this country will stand up against hate and vitriol embodied by Donald Trump and MAGA Republicans,” said Biden-Harris 2024 Co-Chair Congressman Jim Clyburn. “Few places embody these stakes like Mother Emanuel AME – a church that has witnessed the horrors of hate-fueled political violence and a church that has spoken to the conscience of this nation and shown us the path forward after moments of division and despair. I have always said that South Carolina picks presidents and I know President Biden and Vice President Harris agree. We’re all proud to welcome President Biden to the church to remind the nation of what happened and that it is on all of us to fight back against this extremism.”
Associated Press: Biden will visit church where Black people were killed to lay out election stakes and perils of hate
[Colleen Long and Zeke Miller, 1/8/24]
- President Joe Biden wants Americans to grasp the extraordinary stakes of this year’s presidential election, as he sees them. As part of that effort, he’s revisiting some of the nation’s worst traumas to highlight what can happen when hate is allowed to fester.
- On Monday, Biden heads to Charleston, South Carolina, to Mother Emanuel AME Church, the site of a 2015 racist massacre in which nine Black churchgoers were shot to death during Bible study. The event comes after a blunt speech by the Democratic president on the eve of the anniversary of the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol, in which he excoriated former President Donald Trump for “glorifying” rather than condemning political violence.
- Two years later, at the “Unite The Right” gathering of white nationalists in Charlottesville, Virginia, some carrying flaming torches, erupted in violent clashes with counterprotesters. Trump refused to condemn the white nationalists, saying “there is blame on both sides.”
- Biden and his aides argue it’s all part of the same problem: Trump refused to condemn the actions of the white nationalists at that gathering. He’s repeatedly used rhetoric once used by Adolf Hitler to argue that immigrants entering the U.S. illegally are “poisoning the blood of our country,” yet he insisted he had no idea that one of the world’s most reviled and infamous figures once used similar words.
- And Trump has continually repeated his false claims that he won the 2020 election, as well as his assertion that the Capitol rioters were patriotic. He’s called the long prison sentences handed down for some offenders — whom he calls “hostages” and were convicted of crimes like assaulting police officers on Jan. 6 or seditious conspiracy — “one of the saddest things.”
- Jim Clyburn, a South Carolina Democrat, said this year’s election “will determine the fate of American democracy, our freedoms, and whether this country will stand up against hate and vitriol embodied by Donald Trump and MAGA Republicans,” a reference to Trump’s “Make America Great Again” slogan.
- “Few places embody these stakes like Mother Emanuel AME – a church that has witnessed the horrors of hate-fueled political violence and a church that has spoken to the conscience of this nation and shown us the path forward after moments of division and despair,” Clyburn said in a statement.
- In his Jan. 6 anniversary speech, Biden told people in his audience that Trump doesn’t care about their future. “Trump is now promising a full-scale campaign of ‘revenge’ and ‘retribution’ — his words — for some years to come,” Biden said. “They were his words, not mine. He went on to say he would be a dictator on Day One.”
- Biden has repeatedly suggested that democracy itself is on the ballot this year, asking whether it is still “America’s sacred cause.”
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