Biden speaks at South Carolina church rampage site to underline support for racial justice

President Joe Biden on Monday denounced racism at the South Carolina Black church where a hate-filled gunman killed nine parishioners in an effort to underline his support for racial justice as he starts his reelection campaign.

The president’s emotional return to the scene of one of the nation’s worst racist attacks is aimed at reminding Americans of the danger posed by white nationalists and right-wing Republicans like former President Donald Trump.

“The truth is under assault in America and as a consequence so is our democracy,” Biden told an enthusiastic crowd at Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston. “They tried to steal an election now they want to steal history.”

Serenaded by chants of “four more years,” Biden denounced Trump as a “loser” who refuses to accept the verdict of a democratic election fueled in no small part by Black voters.

“In their world, Americans like you don’t count,” Biden said. “Here is Charleston, you know the power of truth.”

Biden also paid tribute to African Americans in South Carolina for forcing the state to remove the Confederate flag from the state house in the days following the rampage.

“You brought it down…and you helped the nation heal,” Biden said.

The speech comes just a couple of days after Biden effectively launched his reelection campaign with a speech warning about the danger to democracy posed by Trump on the eve the anniversary of the Jan. 6 attack.

Along with soaring rhetoric about racial justice and democracy, Biden sought to remind voters of his success on kitchen table issues, including lowering prescription drug prices, lowering Black unemployment and funding historically Black colleges and universities.

Biden’s speech was briefly interrupted by protesters calling for a ceasefire in Israel’s war in Gaza.

But the president successfully parried the interruption by telling the crowd that he agrees with the demonstrators’ goal of a just end to the fighting.

“You’re a good man,” one man shouted from the church as Biden resumed his speech. “They don’t understand that.”

Rep. Jim Clyburn (D-South Carolina) said Biden needs to make more explicit appeals to Black voters to reverse sagging poll numbers reflecting soft support among the Democratic base.

“We have not been able to break through (and tell) people exactly what this president has done,” said Clyburn, an elder statesman in the party who is widely credited with saving Biden’s 2020 primary campaign with his timely backing.

It was June 17, 2015, when Dylann Roof, a white man, shot and killed nine Black parishioners in what he admitted was an effort to ignite a race war.

Biden was vice president when he attended the memorial service in Charleston, where then-President Barack Obama famously sang the spiritual anthem “Amazing Grace.”

Trump, the dominant Republican presidential front-runner, was not in office at the time and has denounced the shooting as “horrible.”

But Democrats want to tie Trump’s current ugly rhetoric to violence including Jan. 6, 2021 and the 2017 white nationalist march in Charlottesville, Virginia that he refused to condemn.

The Charleston speech came two days after Trump inexplicably suggested that President Abraham Lincoln could have avoided the Civil War by negotiating with the slave-holding South.

His claim came after Nikki Haley, one of his only serious rivals in the GOP presidential race, stumbled by failing to mention slavery when a voter asked her what caused the Civil War.

Democrats believe that Trump’s remarks will galvanize Black voters and perhaps other traditional Democratic voters behind Biden’s campaign, especially when coupled with the former president’s increasingly harsh rhetoric about immigrants and support for the violent Jan. 6 attack.

Biden heads into the presidential campaign year beset by historically low polling approval numbers. He is doing particularly poorly among voters who should be his strongest supporters: Blacks, Latinos and young voters.

Aides hope to use a series of events to make specific appeals to those normally strong Democratic voting blocs and to remind them over why they voted against Trump in overwhelming numbers in 2016 and 2020.

Unlike Trump, Biden does not face a serious primary challenge and is virtually certain to be the Democratic nominee, barring some unforeseen crisis.

The rejiggered official Democratic primary race kicks off in South Carolina in February, although rival Rep. Dean Phillips (D-Minnesota) is challenging him in a New Hampshire primary that the party does not recognize.

In his Jan. 6 anniversary speech, Biden told supporters that Trump only cares about riling up his extremist base, not the nation’s shared 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.”

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