“Today a year ago, in this holy place, democracy was attacked. Simply attacked,” said President Joe Biden energetically at the commemoration of the first year of the assault on the Capitol,
From the Statues Hall in the National Capitol Building, Biden delivered a powerful speech with a condemnatory tone once morest former President Trump and the Republicans who spread and supported the so-called “big lie” of electoral fraud that never existed.
That day, supporters of then-President Trump addressed Congress to interrupt Biden’s confirmation of the Electoral College victory. The attack is considered one of the worst attacks on democracy and institutions in US history.
In a powerful and unusual message, Biden said:
“Didn’t we see it? We didn’t see a former president who had just summoned a mob to attack, sitting in a private dining room near the Oval Office at the White House, watching it all on television and doing nothing for hours while the police went attacked “.
“He cannot accept that he lost (…) He refused to accept the results of the elections and the will of the American people,” Biden said in reference to Trump.
“The former president has created and spread a web of lies regarding the 2020 elections. He has done it because he prefers power over principles. Because his bruised ego matters more to him than our democracy or our Constitution.”
“I will always seek to work with Republicans who abide by the rules of the law and not those of one man,” he added, referring to Republicans who bowed to false claims of fraud.
“Are we going to be a nation that lives not in the light of truth but in the shadow of lies?”
Biden said the assault on the Capitol last year was an act in which “For the first time in our history, a president who had just lost an election tried to prevent the peaceful transfer of power … but they failed.”
Biden also stressed that this commemoration should serve to “ensure that such an attack never happens once more.”
The president stressed that the United States is “an ideal” that must be safeguarded. “We are in a battle for the soul of the United States.”
