BLUE BELL, Pennsylvania: US President Joe Biden launched his harshest attack yet on Donald Trump as he kickstarted his 2024 reelection campaign Friday, accusing the Republican of echoing Nazi Germany and posing a threat to democracy. The 81-year-old Democrat branded his likely challenger in November a “loser” and “sick” in a speech on the eve of the third anniversary of the deadly Jan 6 Capitol attack by pro-Trump supporters.

“He’s willing to sacrifice our democracy, put himself in power,” Biden told supporters, alternating between whispers and furious shouts as he laid into the man he beat in 2020. Not only had the twice-impeached former president instigated the Capitol attack, but the tycoon and his followers were still embracing “political violence” ahead of the 2024 vote, said Biden. “He calls those who oppose him vermin. He talks about the blood of Americans being poisoned, echoing the same exact language used in Nazi Germany,” he added.

Biden chose a symbolic location for the speech near Valley Forge in Pennsylvania, the historic site where George Washington rallied American forces fighting their British colonial rulers nearly 250 years ago. He portrayed himself as a defender of America’s institutions, warning that if Trump won a second term in the White House then democracy itself was at risk. “Trump’s assault on democracy isn’t just part of his past. It’s what he’s promising for the future,” said Biden.

Biden’s full frontal attack on Trump came after criticism from some Democrats that the campaign has gotten off to a slow start. Biden lags behind Trump in some polls, and also has the worst approval rating of any modern president at this stage in his term of office. The president has failed to convince voters the economy is improving, while migration remains a headache and US support for Ukraine and the Zionist entity remains divisive among voters.

But perhaps Biden’s biggest vulnerability is his age: As America’s oldest-ever president, he has suffered a series of trips and verbal slips. Biden however warned that the biggest issue of all was Trump, saying that “your freedom is on the ballot”. “Today I make this sacred pledge to you that the defense, protection and preservation of American democracy will remain, as it has been, the central cause of my presidency.”

He accused Trump of being “sick” by laughing at a hammer attack on the husband of former US House speaker Nancy Pelosi, and called him a “loser” over the 2020 election. Biden also lashed out at Trump for his “love letters” to North Korean leader Kim Jong-un and his “admiration” for Russian President Vladimir Putin.

The Trump campaign swiftly hit back. “Biden is the real threat to democracy by weaponizing the government to go after his main political opponent and interfering in the 2024 election,” Trump spokesman Steven Cheung told AFP. The ex-president, himself on the campaign trail, added that Biden was “fear-mongering”. “Biden’s record is an unbroken streak of weakness, incompetence, corruption and failure... That’s why Crooked Joe is staging a pathetic, fear-mongering campaign event in Pennsylvania today,” Trump told supporters in Sioux Center, Iowa.

Trump was impeached but acquitted over the Jan 6 riots. The 77-year-old now faces a criminal trial on charges of trying to subvert the 2020 election. The US states of Colorado and Maine have also barred him from standing in presidential primaries on the grounds that he had engaged in insurrection over the Capitol events. Trump has challenged both rulings.

Trump leads rivals Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis by more than 30 points in Iowa, which stages its Republican nominating contest — known as a “caucus” — on Jan 15, kicking off the 2024 primary season. Biden’s campaign has however identified Trump as their likely opponent, even though the official battle for the Republican nomination doesn’t even start until the Iowa caucuses. His campaign push will continue Monday when the president visits a South Carolina church where a white supremacist shot dead nine Black parishioners in 2015.

Analysts say the 2024 US presidential election remains a very tight race. “If the election were held tomorrow, President Biden would lose,” William Galston, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, told AFP. Until now Biden’s strategy has focused on positive messages about the president’s accomplishments — particularly on leading the economy out of the COVID-19 pandemic. But “they haven’t really moved the needle so far,” said Galston, particularly as many Americans are still feeling the effects of high food and housing prices, whatever the improving government statistics say.

Another major worry is that Biden has been hemorrhaging support among the Black and Hispanic voters who helped him to the White House in 2020. Galston said Biden would have to wage a “vigorous campaign”, including multiple trips to battleground states and presidential debates, to convince voters he was not “doddering and senile”. “If he can’t wage a vigorous campaign I’m afraid that will simply validate the doubts,” he said.

On the economy, Biden would be reliant on wages continuing to rise faster than prices, and a lack of shocks such as a wider Middle East war. “My overall thesis is that President Biden’s campaign is going to have to hope that global events and the domestic economy cooperate,” he said. “Otherwise, that’s going to be an uphill fight for the election.” The Biden campaign now appears to be focusing on his strength as the Democratic Party’s only proven “Trump-slayer”.

But it remains to be seen whether attacking Trump will turn things around. “I would say that democracy really is on the ballot. That’s Biden’s line but I think it’s objectively true, it’s not hyperbole,” said William Howell, a politics professor at the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy. But he told AFP that “most elections are not decided on these kinds of issues, they’re decided on the economy, and the incumbent president’s approval ratings, whether or not we’re at war — these types of material things. And while the stakes are very real, it is less clear that talking about them in a full-throated way is the ticket to actually winning reelection for Biden.” – AFP