Joe Biden formally announced his race for president in the spring of 2019 in Philadelphia, telling supporters that his main motivation was to “repair the spirit of the country.”
On Thursday night, only 2.5 miles from where he stood in 2019, he will speak in Philadelphia about what the White House refers to as “the continuous war for the spirit of the country” on the eve of the customary autumn midterm election season. The former president is currently engaged in a public, drawn-out legal battle on several fronts, and dozens of Trump-backed candidates who share his false belief that the 2020 presidential election was rigged are running for office in crucial states where they could one day exert significant political influence.
However, advisers publicly argue that the speech has nothing to do with Trump but privately admitting that more news stories about the past president benefit the current president’s political position.
“The past president is not the subject of this speech. The topic of this address is American democracy “In a preview of the speech for reporters on Thursday morning, a senior administration official said.
The president will “talk bluntly” about risks to democracy in his speech, but the senior official declined to specify whether Mr. Biden would specifically address Trump by name, saying only that the president has “not shied away from identifying his predecessor.”
“It doesn’t react to any of the day’s news. It is a response to what he perceives as a critical period for this nation, one in which he feels it is his duty to ask the American people this fundamental question about the nature of our country and what must be done to address the threat to democracy that he believes currently exists “added the official, who was given anonymity by media outlets to discuss the speech’s specifics in advance.
The president would give the address in front of a few hundred invited spectators outside Independence Hall, according to the White House.
Republicans claim that Mr. Biden is going back on campaign promises to bring the nation together and not disparage opponents in an effort to capitalize on the president’s poor support numbers and keep the spotlight on him. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy is scheduled to make the claim that the president intends to “disparage hardworking Americans and give no strategy to turn our nation around from the mess Democrats have created” in a speech on Thursday afternoon.
Sen. Marco Rubio, a Republican from Florida, criticized the president for breaking an Inauguration Day promise to bring the nation together by bringing up remarks made by Vice President Joe Biden at a Democratic Party fundraiser last week in which he said that “an extreme MAGA philosophy” is “like semi-fascism.”
In effect, they’ve now built a wall, and if you criticize them, they’ll say you’re putting their safety in peril, added Rubio. “They don’t attack Republicans, on the other hand. They attempt to dehumanize, slander, and tarnish Republicans by referring to Republican supporters as semi-fascists rather than Republican officeholders or regular people.”
When you attack the FBI, Rubio said, “you get all these news reports about never-before-seen threats to the FBI.” “You criticize the IRS, and a few days later the IRS claims that it is now under attack,”
White House advisers responded by insisting that his words on Thursday night shouldn’t be seen as an overt political pitch to voters. According to the senior source, the president will discuss concerns that come “not from the Republican party,” but rather from “MAGA Republicans and the radicalism that is now a threat to our democratic ideals” in his address.
A movement that “does not recognize free and fair elections, a movement that is increasingly talking about violence in reaction to things that they don’t like or agree with, which is not the way democracies function,” was how the official defined the MAGA agenda.
The president frequently discusses how the violent 2017 protests in Charlottesville, Virginia, led by white supremacists, an event that prompted Trump to say there were good people “on both sides” of the violent aftermath, made him feel compelled to run for the Oval Office again and restore the nation’s soul. Additionally, he has often attempted to position his presidency at the head of a conflict between autocracies and democracies for control of the world.
However, in more recent weeks, the president’s discussions about democracy have become much more partisan and abrasive, including his criticism of remarks made last weekend by South Carolina Republican Sen. Lindsey O. Graham, who asserted that there would be riots in the streets if Trump were to face charges for allegedly mishandling classified documents.
He asked the audience at a rally in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, on Tuesday, “Did any of you believe if you’re as old as I am, you’ve ever seen an election when we speak about, it’s OK to use force and political violence in America?” “It is never acceptable. Never.”
For this story, Jack Turman and Kathryn Watson helped out.