As his predecessor plans a weekend rally in his hometown, President Biden is set to deliver a primetime speech on Thursday night in Philadelphia, taking aim at the Republican Party’s right-wing and enablers of former President Donald Trump.
Biden is scheduled to deliver the speech at 8 p.m. Eastern time from Independence Hall in downtown Philadelphia. The remarks come two months ahead of the midterm elections, with Trump eyeing an extraordinarily early launch to a 2024 White House bid.
Trump plans to host a rally on Saturday in Biden’s birthplace of Scranton, Pa. Biden will get a word in first 125 miles south in Philadelphia, as the swing state of Pennsylvania — won by Biden in 2020 and Trump in 2016 — emerges once more as a political proving ground.
In press materials, the White House bills Biden’s Thursday night remarks as a speech on the “battle for the Soul of the Nation.” The 79-year-old Democrat’s speech will be viewable here:
Biden is scheduled to return to the White House in Washington by around 10:30 p.m.
He has not frequently addressed his immediate predecessor during his 19 months as president. But he has at times, including in an intense and personal speech marking the one-year anniversary of the violent Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection inspired by Trump’s election falsehoods.
Biden, buoyed by congressional successes and falling gas prices, saw his approval ratings rise sharply in August, though they remain underwater.
And Democrats’ chances of maintaining power in one or both chambers of Congress after the midterms have soared since the Supreme Court erased Roe v. Wade, according to the polling aggregator FiveThirtyEight. The court was remade by Trump to tilt further to the right.
The White House press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, declined Wednesday to get into the specifics of Biden’s planned speech, but said the president believes there is “an extremist threat to our democracy.”
“The MAGA Republicans are the most energized part of the Republican Party,” Jean-Pierre said in a news briefing. “This is an extreme threat to our democracy, to our freedom, to our rights.”
