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The Biden reelection campaign has enlisted three police officers – all of whom were working at the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, when rioters overtook the building – to stump for Biden across battleground states in the coming weeks, the campaign told CNN.
Sgt. Aquilino Gonell, Officer Harry Dunn and Officer Danny Hodges plan to tell voters across key swing states that former President Donald Trump poses a threat to democracy and to their fundamental rights as Americans. Dunn and Gonell sustained injuries during the attack on the Capitol and have since retired from the Capitol Police. Hodges continues to serve with DC’s Metropolitan Police Department.
“We were the victims, we lived through it,” Dunn, who mounted an unsuccessful bid for Congress, told CNN in an interview. “If I can tell that story a million times, I will. If I can do that, I’ll just be doing my part to save democracy.”
The effort will see the surrogates travel to Nevada and Arizona this week and Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan and New Hampshire in the weeks to follow. The campaign expects to hammer the first-person, threat-to-democracy message in the weeks leading up to the first debate between Biden and Trump that is set for June 27 and hosted by CNN.
Some of that messaging has already been tested. In a fundraising email to Biden supporters last week, Gonell described sustaining career-ending injuries and being “trampled in a tunnel” – and noting he would continue fighting for America after being in uniform.
“That includes doing everything I can to make sure Donald Trump – the man who calls the January 6 insurrectionists who nearly took my life ‘patriots’ and literally salutes them, is never elected president again,” the email read.
The move underscores a critical pillar of the Biden team’s messaging strategy on the trail and on the debate state in Atlanta: channeling the events of January 6 into a broader argument about Trump’s mental stability – and goading Trump into an outsized response.
“When Trump lost the 2020 election, he snapped,” wrote Biden-Harris campaign chair Jen O’Malley Dillon in a memo released Friday alongside a new ad with the same message. “He tried desperately to cling to power, and encouraged a violent assault on our nation’s Capitol, cheering on a mob that threatened to hang his own vice president.”
The democracy-centric messaging at home will also coincide with a series of democracy-focused summits with international allies, including a trip to France to commemorate the 80th anniversary of D-Day, an annual gathering of leaders from the Group of Seven developed democracies and a NATO summit in Washington, DC, that’s expected to be focused on defending Ukraine against Russia.
CNN’s Priscilla Alvarez contributed to this report.
