President Biden has said Donald Trump is “willing to sacrifice our democracy” to put himself in power again – as he spoke three years on from the Capitol riots.
Mr Trump is currently favourite to be his rival once again in November’s presidential election.
And Mr Biden launched an extended attack on his ambitions and motivations – repeatedly referencing the 6 January riot when Trump supporters stormed the Capitol building.
The president said the election would be a fight for the country’s soul and “all about whether democracy is still America’s sacred cause”.
“Democracy is on the ballot. Your freedom is on the ballot,” he said.
He painted Mr Trump’s re-election campaign as a backward-looking ego-trip and “all about him, not America”.
The Capitol riots, in Washington in 2021, saw Trump supporters run amok amid false claims that the election had been “stolen”.
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Mr Biden called it one of the “worst derelictions by a president in US history” because Mr Trump did not intervene.
“He told the crowd to fight like hell. And all hell was unleashed,” Mr Biden told supporters near Valley Forge, Pennsylvania.
“Then as usual he left the dirty work to others. He retreated to the White House.”
“We nearly lost America – lost it all,” Mr Biden added.
Five people died due to the chaos and dozens were injured, as thousands descended on Washington to try to stop the election result being certified.
The ex-president is promising “revenge and retribution” if elected again and his campaign has glorified the riots, said Mr Biden.
He said Trump’s description of his opponents as “vermin” was the “exact same language used in Nazi Germany,
Mr Biden also hit out at Mr Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 result, saying he had lost 60 court cases and “exhausted every legal avenue”.
The former president faces dozens of criminal charges related to his efforts to reverse his election loss.
However, Mr Trump says top Democrats and President Biden are themselves trying to subvert democracy by using the legal system to stop his campaign.
Mr Biden’s attack on his Republican rival came in his first major campaign speech of the year.
