Jan. 5 (UPI) — President Joe Biden will make his first campaign speech of the new year near Valley Forge, Pa., on Friday afternoon.
Biden is set to begin the speech at 3:15 p.m. as he is expected cast former President Donald Trump as a threat to democracy while also marking the third anniversary of the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.
The speech was originally set to take place exactly three years from the riots on Saturday but a winter storm approaching the U.S. Northeast forced his campaign to push the speech forward.
Biden campaign spokesman Kevin Munoz announced the change of date on X earlier this week.
“Due to impending inclement weather in the Philadelphia area this weekend, the President’s campaign speech near Valley Forge on Saturday, Jan. 6 will be moved to Friday, Jan. 5,” he wrote.
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.
The president and first lady Jill Biden planned to depart Washington on Friday for New Castle, Del., and from there fly to Pennsylvania, where the president will make the campaign speech.
On Monday, Biden plans to deliver remarks 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.”
Biden’s first campaign speech of 2024 is expected to recall 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.”
