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Jan. 5 (UPI) -- In his first campaign speech of the new year, President Joe Biden doubled down on his rebuke of former President Donald Trump and the rioters on Jan. 6. Biden's speech Friday afternoon near Valley Forge, Pa., marked the third anniversary of the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. In his opening remarks, Biden posed the question, "is democracy still America's sacred cause?"
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"The choice is clear: Donald's Trump campaign is about him, not America, not you," Biden said. "Donald Trump's campaign is obsessed with the past, not the future. He's willing to sacrifice our democracy. Our campaign is different ... our campaign is about America. It's about you ... it's about the future that we're going to continue to build together."
Reflecting on the events of Jan. 6, Biden called Trump's incitement of the Capitol rioters "among the worst derelictions of duty by a president in American history."
"Trump exhausted every legal avenue to overturn the election, but the legal path just took Trump back to the truth: that I'd won the election, and he was a loser," Biden said. "Knowing how his mind works now, he had one act left: the violence of Jan. 6."
Since the attack on the Capitol, more than 1,200 people were charged, and nearly 900 pleaded guilty, Biden said, adding collectively, they were sentenced to more than 840 years in prison. The president warned Trump plans to pardon those charged in the Jan. 6 riots if he returns to office.
Biden selected the Valley Forge venue to draw a symbolic connection between his efforts to "heal the soul of the nation" and George Washington's undaunted spirit during the American Revolution hundreds of years earlier.
"General Washington knew something in his bones; something about the spirit of the troops he was leading; something about the soul of the nation that was struggling to be born," Biden said. "In his general order he predicted, 'with one heart, one mind, with fortitude and with patience' they would overcome every difficulty ... and they did."
Biden's first campaign speech of 2024 recalled his 2021 inauguration speech -- which he gave just two weeks after the deadly Capitol riot -- in which he denounced the rise in extremism, White supremacy and domestic terrorism, as threats to the nation "that we must confront and we will defeat."
"I saw an America that had been pushed to the brink, but I felt enormous pride," He said. "I felt enormous pride in America, because American democracy had been tested; American democracy had held together."
The speech was originally set to take place on Saturday, exactly three years from the riots, but a winter storm approaching the U.S. Northeast forced his campaign to push the speech forward.
The president and first lady Jill Biden departed Washington on Friday for New Castle, Del., and from there flew to Pennsylvania, where the president made the campaign speech.
Biden also plans to deliver remarks Monday at Mother Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, S.C., where nine Black parishioners were gunned down by a White supremacist in 2015.
With the start of the 2024 primary season just days away, the Biden campaign was raring to turn up the heat on Trump, fearing the Republican candidate's potential to win a second term as he remained the frontrunner by a wide margin over his GOP challengers.
Previously, Biden communications director Michael Tyler asserted that Trump would leverage "all of his power to systematically dismantle and destroy our democracy."
