US President Joe Biden (2L) participates in a tour and briefing of an area affected by Hurricane Helene in Keaton Beach, Florida, on October 3, 2024. – Also pictured are US Senator Rick Scott (L), Republican of Florida, and FEMA Deputy Administrator Erik Hooks. (AFP)
WASHINGTON – President Joe Biden said Friday he was not confident the US election in November would be peaceful, citing incendiary comments by Republican contender Donald Trump, who still rejects his 2020 defeat.
Biden’s warning came with lawmakers and analysts voicing concern over increasingly bellicose campaign language ahead of the vote.
Trump — who survived an assassination bid in July and another apparent plot in September — alleged widespread fraud after his defeat to Biden in 2020, and pro-Trump rioters riled up by his false claims ransacked the Capitol.
“I’m confident it will be free and fair. I don’t know whether it will be peaceful,” Biden told reporters as he discussed the election.
“The things that Trump has said and the things that he said last time out when he didn’t like the outcome of the election were very dangerous.”
Trump was impeached in 2021 for inciting the insurrection after hundreds of his supporters — exhorted by the defeated Republican to “fight like hell” — battered police as they smashed windows at the Capitol and broke through doors.
‘Angry crowd’
He has been indicted over what prosecutors allege was a “private criminal effort” to subvert the election that culminated in the violence.
“When all else had failed,” the indictment reads, Trump directed an “angry crowd” to disrupt the certification of the vote.
Trump — who is due to return to the venue of his first assassination bid in Butler, Pennsylvania this weekend — has long been assailed over his violent rhetoric.
Biden joined the criticism during the first appearance of his presidency in the White House briefing room to tout the Democrats’ achievements as his vice president Kamala Harris prepares to take on Trump.
Trump campaigned Friday in Georgia, a swing state narrowly claimed by Biden four years ago but won by Trump in 2016 — and one of the biggest prizes of the 2024 election map.
The Republican inserted himself aggressively into Georgia politics after his 2020 defeat, pushing for Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger in a now-infamous phone call to “find” enough votes to overturn Biden’s victory.
Trump, 78, was charged by state prosecutors with racketeering, in a case that is on pause and expected to start up again after the election. He furiously denies wrongdoing.
He blamed Raffensperger and Georgia’s Governor Brian Kemp for refusing to help him reverse his defeat, and tried unsuccessfully to oust both.
‘Terrible response’
His foiled revenge plot — and his repeated smears of Kemp at rallies and on social media — raised questions about his sway over his party in one of the country’s key battlegrounds.
But Trump and Kemp have since buried the hatchet, and the governor has endorsed the Republican presidential ticket.
The pair delivered remarks together after receiving a briefing in Augusta on the devastation wreaked by Hurricane Helene, the deadliest storm to hit the US mainland since 2005’s Katrina.
Trump has repeatedly spread misinformation about the federal response to the disaster, falsely alleging that funding for relief has been misappropriated by Harris and redirected towards migrants.
He appeared to repeat the claim in Georgia as he baselessly claimed: “It’s been a terrible response from the White House. They’re missing a billion dollars that was used for another purpose, and nobody’s seen anything like that.”
Harris, who is neck-and-neck with Trump in all seven swing states, was set to rally Friday in Michigan — a union stronghold that epitomized the US manufacturing decline of the 1980s.
The Democrat contender was expected to accuse Trump and his running mate J.D. Vance of jeopardizing Michigan auto jobs.
“This is a man who has only ever fought for himself. This is a man who has been a union buster his entire career,” she said at an earlier stop in Detroit.
Harris, 59, is due this evening in Flint, a majority Black city where a 2010s scandal over lead-tainted water highlighted government mismanagement and the disproportionate damage to poor and non-white communities.
Harris’s campaign announced that the country’s first Black president, Barack Obama, would stump for her in Pennsylvania and other key swing states from next week as she woos undecided voters in the US heartland.