Biden rips into Trump on anniversary of Jan. 6 attack: ‘He can’t accept he lost’

President Biden marked the first anniversary of the storming of the Capitol by emphatically blaming former President Trump for inciting and leading the attack — and lying about it for his own selfish interests.

Standing inside the Capitol that was ransacked by angry Trump supporters a year ago, Biden pulled no punches as he accused the twice-impeached president of seeking to illegally stay in power by overturning the results of the 2020 presidential election.

“He can’t accept that he lost,” Biden said. “He refused to accept the results of an election.”

“He’s not just a former president,” Biden added. “He’s the defeated former president. He lost by 7 million of your votes.”

Flanked by Vice President Kamala Harris, Biden emphatically denounced the mob as well as Trump and his allies who sent them to the Capitol. He called them an existential and ongoing threat to American democracy.

“You can’t love your country only when you win,” Biden said. “Those who instigated and incited held a dagger to the throat of American democracy.”

Biden refused to utter Trump’s name.

But he trashed Trump in unusually personal terms, noting that Trump watched on TV as his supporters marauded through the Capitol hunting down perceived enemies like then-Vice President Mike Pence.

Biden also denounced the GOP for joining a yearlong campaign concocted by Trump to whitewash the attack and to promote a Big Lie that the election was stolen from him.

Mocking Trump for failing to prove any of his outlandish claims about the election, Biden vowed to lead the fight to preserve American democracy.

“I did not seek this fight brought to this Capitol ... But I will not shrink from it either,” he said. “I will stand in this breach. I will defend this nation. And I will allow no one to place a dagger at the throat of democracy.”

Trump responded to Biden’s speech by issuing a statement within minutes. He falsely claimed Biden used “my name” in a divisive act of “political theater.”

The ex-president did not even mention the actual attack on the Capitol and used the statement to repeat his false claims that the election was “rigged.”

Biden fiercely defended the police officers who defended the Capitol and lawmakers from both parties who stood together to affirm the election results in the hours after the attack.

“Don’t kid yourself: the pain and scars from that day run deep,” he said.

Biden also issued his familiar calls for unity and healing to repair what he likes to call “the soul of America.”

But his main message was to assign blame to Trump for what he calls a historic and not-yet-done campaign to undermine American democracy.

“They want to rule or they will ruin,” Biden said.

Underlining the importance that Democrats assign to the attack, Harris compared Jan. 6, 2001 to two other infamous dates in American history: Dec. 7, 1941 when the U.S. was attacked at Pearl Harbor and the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

The first Black vice president stressed the link between the battle to prevent another Jan. 6 attack with the fight for beefed-up voting rights protections.

Those are fighting words to Republican leaders, who see Democratic efforts to defend and expand the right to vote as a partisan political issue, not a moral calling for the entire nation.

A series of Jan. 6 remembrance events during the day will be widely attended by Democrats, in person and virtually, but few if any prominent Republicans planned to attend.

After initially denouncing Trump’s actions, Republicans soon reverted to supporting him and whitewashing his role in inciting the attack, which followed his own fiery speech in which he encouraged supporters to march on the Capitol and “fight like hell” to keep him in power.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) shied away from convicting Trump at his impeachment trial, a failure that opened the door to Trump to mount a potent political comeback that he hopes will power a return to the White House in 2024.

Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) declared his renewed loyalty to Trump just weeks after the attack and hopes Trump’s diehard supporters will catapult him to Speaker of the House if the GOP wins the 2022 midterm elections.

Even Pence, who was targeted for assassination by the rioters, has shockingly sought to downplay the severity of the attack as he seeks to curry favor with Trump supporters for a possible White House run of his own.