President Biden was speaking on the one-year anniversary of the US Capitol attack.
US President Joe Biden has accused his predecessor Donald Trump of spreading a “web of lies” about the 2020 election one year after the deadly US Capitol attack.
On 6 January 2021, a mob of Trump supporters attacked the US Capitol in Washington, DC as they sought to overturn his defeat in the 2020 presidential election.
Speaking at the scene of the riots, Biden said that last year “democracy was attacked” and that the US Constitution “faced the gravest of threats”.
“Outnumbered in the face of the brutal attack, the Capitol Police, the DC Metropolitan Police Department, the National Guard and other brave law enforcement officials saved the rule of law,” he said.
“Our democracy held. We the people endured. We the people prevail.”
During his remarks, Biden criticised Trump, accusing him of trying to “prevent the peaceful transfer of power”.
“What did we not see [on 6 January, 2021]?” the US President asked.
“We didn’t see a former president who had just rallied the mob to attack sitting in a private dining room off the Oval Office in the White House watching it all on television and doing nothing for hours as police were assaulted, lives at risk.
“In life there’s truth and tragically there are lies, lies conceived and spread for profit and power. We must be absolutely clear about what is true and what is a lie.
“Here is the truth – a former president of the United States of America has created and spread a web of lies about the 2020 election.
“He’s done so because he values power over principle, because he sees his own interest as more important than his country’s interest, than America’s interest.
“And because his bruised ego matters more to him than our democracy or our constitution, he can’t accept he lost even though that’s what 93 United States senators, his own Attorney General, his own Vice President, governors and state officials in every battleground state have all said. He lost.
“That’s what 81 million of you did as you voted for a new way forward.
“He has done what no president in American history, the history of this country, has ever ever done.
“He refused to accept the results of an election and the will of the American people.”
Biden also said that the US must make sure that such an attack “never happens again” and that the country must decide what kind of nation it is going to be.
“Are we going to be a nation that lives not by the light of the truth but in the shadow of lies? We can not allow ourselves to be that kind of nation.
“The way forward is to recognise the truth and to live by it.”
You can watch President Biden’s remarks in full below.
Clip via The White House
LISTEN: You Must Be Jokin’ with Aideen McQueen – Faith healers, Coolock craic and Gigging as Gaeilge
