The "Sacred Cause" of Democracy

President Biden takes the case to Valley Forge and Donald Trump

“Whether democracy is still America’s sacred cause is the most urgent question of our time,” President Joe Biden said Friday. (Photo by Drew Angerer via Getty Images)

Nearly half way through President Joe Biden’s speech Friday near Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, he told the story of Donald Trump’s first campaign rally for the 2024 election. It began, he said, “with a choir of January 6th insurrectionists singing from prison on a cellphone while images of the January 6th riot played on the big screen behind him at his rally.”

Incredulous, Biden asked, “Can you believe that? This is like something out of a fairy tale, a bad fairy tale…glorifying the failed violent insurrectionists.”

Biden had just recounted an example of Trump’s despicable cruelty—and how he and his MAGA cult “not only embrace political violence, but they laugh about it.” He described that terrible night in October 2022 when an intruder broke into the San Francisco home of Nancy and Paul Pelosi—”whipped by the big Trump lie, taking a hammer to Paul Pelosi’s skull.”

Trump joked about it at his rally, Biden said. “He thinks that’s funny. He laughed about it. What a sick…” And then the depravity hit him. “My God…Not just for a president, but for any person to say that.”

Biden opened his speech by taking the audience back to the winter of 1777, when General George Washington and his Continental Army marched to Valley Forge, amid the bitter cold, in a war “against the most powerful empire in existence.” Washington’s mission, Biden said, “was clear: Liberty, not conquest. Freedom, not domination. National independence, not individual glory…Never again would we bow down to a king.”

This “ragtag Army made up of ordinary people,” he said, struggled without adequate “blankets and food, clothes and shoes.” But “their mission, George Washington declared, was nothing less than a sacred cause…Freedom, Liberty. Democracy. American democracy.”

Biden turned to the present. “Whether democracy is still America’s sacred cause is the most urgent question of our time—and it’s what the 2024 election is all about,” Biden said, adding later, “Today, I make this sacred pledge to you: The defense, protection and preservation of American democracy will remain, as it has been, the central cause of my presidency.”

The president came to Valley Forge on the eve of the third anniversary of the January 6th insurrection and Capitol attack. Referring to the year ahead, he said, “This is the first national election since the January 6th insurrection placed a dagger at the throat of American democracy.”

It was a powerful image and a telling reminder that he grasps the scale of the lie, the danger it represents and the stakes it involves. Biden also pushed back against the revisionism since that day: “In trying to rewrite the facts of January 6th, Trump was trying to steal history, the same way he tried to steal the election.”'

He articulated what he knows to be true and what we saw with our own eyes:

Trump’s mob wasn’t a peaceful protest. It was a violent assault. They were insurrectionists, not patriots. They weren’t there to uphold the Constitution. They were there to destroy the Constitution. Trump won’t do what an American president must do. He refuses to denounce political violence.

And he offered his sharp contrast: “I’ll say what Donald Trump won’t: Political violence is never, ever acceptable in the United States political system. Never, never, never. It has no place in a democracy. None. You can’t be pro-insurrectionist and pro-American.”

Speaking to “Democrats, Independents, mainstream Republicans,” he said that “we have to make our choice. I know mine, and I believe I know America’s. We’ll defend the truth, not give in to the big lie. We’ll embrace the constitution of the Declaration, not abandon it. We’ll honor the sacred cause of democracy, not walk away from it.”

In the 2020 election, it was clear that it was a race between an empath and a sociopath. Biden’s obvious anger in this speech toward Trump’s sadism and cruelty is as palpable as his commitment to democracy. It underscores the vivid battle over values—and it gives me hope that he will make this year the fight of his life.

Two months before the 2022 midterms, in another speech in another Pennsylvania town (Philadelphia), Biden made clear that this was a battle for democracy and against “MAGA Republicans” who, as he put it, operate on "fear, division and darkness," who "embrace anger and thrive on chaos," who think “either they win or they were cheated,” who have chosen “blind loyalty to a single leader and a willingness to engage in political violence.”

Not much has changed from that accurate summary—except that, as his likely opponent ramps up his hatred and violence and pursuit of retribution and immunity, America’s president will need to be naming the criminal defendant often, loudly and mercilessly. As much as we need him to speak powerfully and with inspiration about the sacred cause of democracy and America’s central beliefs—which he said Friday include “decency, dignity, honesty, honor, truth”—we need him to hit hard the malignant one who belongs in a jail cell not the Oval Office. The future of democracy depends on it.

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