Biden chooses sacred space for campaign stop
S.C. — President Biden sought to rally disaffected Black supporters Monday with a fiery condemnation of former president Trump, linking his predecessor’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election to the nation’s history of white supremacy in what he called “the old ghost in new garments.”
Speaking from the pulpit of the South’s oldest African Methodist Episcopal Church, Biden drew a direct line from slavery, the Civil War, and Jim Crow to the divisions of today. Just as it was a “self-serving lie” to call the Confederate rebellion a “noble cause,” the president called Trump’s insistence that he won the election an effort to rewrite history.
“Once again, there are some in this country trying to turn loss into a lie — a lie which, if allowed to live, will once again bring terrible damage to this country,” Biden told about 700 parishioners and other guests at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston. “This time, the lie is about the 2020 election.”
The president also took a shot at Nikki Haley, the former South Carolina governor and onetime ambassador to the United Nations who is seeking to deny Trump the Republican nomination this year. Without naming her, Biden mocked Haley for refusing at a recent campaign event to name slavery when asked what started the Civil War.
“Let me be clear, for those who don’t seem to know: Slavery was the cause of the Civil War,” Biden said.
The visit to South Carolina, the state that helped make
Biden the Democratic nominee nearly four years ago, was the second part of the president’s two-stage opening campaign swing of the election year. On Friday, he gave a speech near Valley Forge, Pa., denouncing Trump on the eve of the third anniversary of the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. In coming to the storied Black church where a white supremacist killed the pastor and eight parishioners in 2015, Biden hoped to remind a key voting bloc of the significance of the election in November.
After the massacre, Biden, then the vice president, joined President Obama in Charleston at the funeral of the pastor, the Rev. Clementa Pinckney, a state senator, where Obama delivered a eulogy and unexpectedly sang “Amazing Grace.” Biden, then mourning his son Beau, who had died of cancer weeks earlier, returned a couple of days later to pray with the congregation at the church, commonly called Mother Emanuel.
He made it clear that his own mourning had melded with theirs. He had come to show the administration’s solidarity, he said, but also “to draw some strength from all of you.”
Biden has often attributed his decision to run for president in 2020 to Trump’s racial provocations, particularly when Trump said there were “very fine people on both sides” of a deadly white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Va., in 2017. But Biden has lost support among Black supporters who could be crucial to his hopes for beating Trump in a rematch this year.
Twenty-two percent of Black voters in six battleground states told pollsters from The New
York Times and Siena College last fall that they would vote for Trump, while the president was drawing 71 percent. Such support indicates a surge for
Trump, who won 8 percent of Black voters nationally in 2020.
Black Democrats in South Carolina helped save Biden’s flagging campaign for the party’s nomination in 2020 after weak showings in Iowa and New Hampshire. The president has since orchestrated South Carolina’s ascendance as the first primary state for 2024, on Feb. 3.
In his speech, Biden recalled the dark days nearly nine years ago when gunfire erupted just feet away from where he was standing Monday, a slaughter born, he said, of poison.
“What is that poison?” he asked. “White supremacy. Throughout our history, it has ripped our nation apart.
“It has no place in America — not today, not tomorrow or ever.”