President Biden tilted into campaign mode in a combative speech in Philadelphia on Thursday, targeting his predecessor and tarring the modern Republican Party as an entity infected by extremists intent on stripping Americans of treasured rights.
“Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans represent an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our republic,” Biden said at Independence Hall in downtown Philadelphia, clarifying that not every Republican is devoted to Trump before barreling ahead in one of the most fiercely political speeches of his presidency.
“There’s no question that the Republican Party today is dominated, driven and intimidated by Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans,” Biden declared. “And that is a threat to this country.”
The president delivered his primetime Pennsylvania speech as the November midterm election nears, and as the contours of a possible 2024 rematch between Biden and Trump sharpen.
Biden’s remarks amounted to an unmistakable escalation in rhetoric from a commander-in-chief who has often tried to stay above the fray.
Rebuking pro-Trump Republicans as a “clear and present danger” to American democracy, Biden said the nation is approaching an inflection point.
“Now, America must choose: To move forward or to move backwards,” the president asserted in the 24-minute speech. “To build a future or obsess about the past. To be a nation of hope and unity and optimism. Or a nation of fear, division and darkness.”
Trump, still clinging to claims that he won the 2020 election he lost to Biden, plans to host a rally on Saturday in Biden’s birthplace of Scranton, Pa.
But the current president got a word in first, with the swing state of Pennsylvania — won by Biden in 2020 and Trump in 2016 — emerging once more as a political proving ground.
Trump’s shadow looms over the midterms. In June, the conservative Supreme Court, reshaped by Trump, struck down Roe v. Wade and, along with it, a half-century of jurisprudence securing the right to abortion.
The ruling, which Trump is said to have seen as political poison for his own party, has appeared to supercharge Democrats’ chances at the midterms, fueling liberal outrage and putting conservatives on their backfoot.
In his speech, Biden charged that Republicans seek to return America to a place “where there is no right to choose, no right to privacy, no right to contraception, no right to marry who you love.”
The line nodded to the threat of one conservative Supreme Court justice, Clarence Thomas, who wrote a concurring opinion in the ruling ending Roe saying that the court should also reconsider past decisions ensuring the rights to same-sex marriage, same-sex intimacy and birth control.
Across the first 19 months of his presidency, Biden has worked with the benefit of narrow Democratic majorities in both the House and Senate.
For months, the GOP banked on a November takeover in both chambers, expecting inflation and angst over crime to serve as headwinds for Democrats in power. But the Supreme Court’s ruling and a string of congressional wins for Democrats have rearranged the political terrain.
Meanwhile, Trump — who did not immediately respond on social media to Biden’s speech — has faced a disastrous summer buffeted by scandal. The 76-year-old Republican was embarrassed by damning testimony to the House committee probing the deadly Jan. 6 Capitol assault he inspired.
Then the FBI searched his Mar-a-Lago home in Palm Beach, Fla., recovering top secret documents, according to an unsealed search warrant.
Since his election, Biden has criticized Trump sparingly. But on Thursday, the 79-year-old Democrat focused on ripping Trump while he is down, and working to boost his own rising, but still underwater, approval ratings.
“MAGA Republicans do not respect the Constitution,” Biden said. “They do not believe in the rule of law. They do not recognize the will of the people. They refuse to accept the results of a free election.”
“They’re working right now, as I speak, in state after state, to give power to decide elections in America to partisans and cronies,” Biden added. “MAGA forces are determined to take this country backwards.”
But he expressed hope for the nation he leads, even as he delivered a dark warning that one of the two major parties is deeply corrupted.
“We are still an America that believes in honesty and decency and respect for others,” Biden said, his voice rising. “We are still, at our core, a democracy.”
