In the spring of 2019, Joe Biden officially began his presidential quest in Philadelphia, saying supporters the first reason he was running was to “repair the soul of the nation.”
Back in Philadelphia on Thursday night, only two and a half miles from where he stood in 2019, he is slated to discuss what the White House called “the continuous war for the spirit of the nation” on the eve of the usual fall midterm campaign season. The address comes as former President Donald Trump is facing a high-profile, protracted legal battle on several fronts and dozens of Trump-backed candidates who share his false belief that the 2020 presidential election was stolen are seeking office in battleground states where they could one day control the levers of elections.
But officials, who privately admit that more news headlines about the past president assist improve the current president’s political position, officially assert the address has nothing to do with Trump.
“This is not a speech about the former president. This is a speech about American democracy,” a senior administration official said Thursday morning in a preview of the speech for media. The address is expected to begin at 8 p.m. ET.
The president is slated to “talk bluntly” about what he perceives as challenges to democracy, but the senior source would not specify whether Mr. Biden will address Trump by name, only saying that the current president has “not shied away from identifying his predecessor.”
“It is not in response to any news of the day. It is a response to what he sees as a moment in this country … where he feels it is his responsibility to bring to the American people this fundamental question about what kind of a nation we are going to be, and what we need to do in order to address the threat to our democracy that he believes exists right now,” added the official, who was granted anonymity by news organizations to share details of the speech in advance.
The president will deliver the speech outside Independence Hall in front of an invited crowd of a few hundred individuals, according to the White House.
Republicans, keen to exploit the president’s low support numbers and keep the attention on him, contend that Mr. Biden is reneging on campaign commitments to unite the country and not speak badly of opponents. In a speech Thursday afternoon, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy is scheduled to say that the president wants to “disparage hard working Americans and give no strategy to turn our country around from the disaster Democrats have created.”
Speaking Wednesday night on Fox News, Florida Republican Sen. Marco Rubio faulted the president for reneging on an Inauguration Day pledge to unite the country by calling out comments Mr. Biden made at a closed-door Democratic Party fundraiser last week, when he said that “an extreme MAGA philosophy” is “like semi-fascism.”
“In essence, they have now built a shield where if you criticize them, they will argue that you are putting them in risk,” Rubio stated. “On the contrary, they do not attack Republicans. They attempt to dehumanize, slander, and tarnish Republicans by labeling Republican supporters as semi-fascists, as opposed to Republican officeholders.”
Rubio said, “When you criticize the FBI, you get all these news reports about unprecedented threats against the FBI.” “You criticize the IRS, and a few days later the IRS claims that it is suddenly being endangered.”
White House sources cautioned that his words on Thursday evening should not be interpreted as an overt political appeal to voters. The address will outline what the president views as threats “not from the Republican party,” but from “MAGA Republicans and the radicalism that is a threat to our democratic values right now,” according to a senior administration official.
The official defined the MAGA agenda as “a movement that does not recognize free and fair elections, a movement that is increasingly advocating violence in response to things they disagree with or do not like, which is not how democracies behave.”
The president frequently discusses how, as a twice-failed presidential candidate and former vice president, he felt compelled to run again for the Oval Office and restore the nation’s soul after the violent 2017 protests in Charlottesville, Virginia, led by white supremacists, an event that prompted him to say that there were good people on “both sides” of the violence. And he has often attempted to position his presidency at the frontline of a struggle between autocracies and democracies for global dominance.
In recent weeks, however, the president’s discourse on democracy has become much more partisan and combative, including criticism of remarks made last weekend by South Carolina Republican Sen. Lindsey O. Graham, who asserted that “there will be riots in the streets” if Trump is prosecuted for alleged mishandling of classified documents.
During a rally on Tuesday in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, he asked the audience, “Did any of you believe, if you’re as old as I am, that you’ve ever witnessed an election in which force and political violence were acceptable?” “It is never acceptable. Never.”
This report was compiled by Jack Turman and Kathryn Watson.
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