President Joe Biden is set to visit Philadelphia on Thursday to deliver a primetime address on the “continued battle for the Soul of the Nation,” per the White House – a topic that has received renewed attention in the leadup to the midterm elections.
The administration has been largely mum on the specifics of the president’s address, but White House press secretary Karinne Jean-Pierre told reporters on Wednesday Biden will speak to the “majority of Americans who believe that we need to […] save the core values of our country.”
Those core values, as Biden laid out in an op-ed published in The Atlantic as he was running for president in 2017, include civil liberties, civil rights, human rights and democracy, all of which he said were “being met by a ferocious pushback from the oldest and darkest forces in America.”
“Today we have an American president who has publicly proclaimed a moral equivalency between neo-Nazis and Klansmen and those who would oppose their venom and hate,” he wrote, referencing then-President Donald Trump without mentioning him by name. “We have an American president who has emboldened white supremacists with messages of comfort and support.”
It was a message Biden echoed – although with more measured language – during his inaugural address on Jan. 20, 2021.
“And now, a rise in political extremism, white supremacy, domestic terrorism that we must confront and we will defeat,” he said. “To overcome these challenges – to restore the soul and to secure the future of America – requires more than words. It requires that most elusive of things in a democracy: unity.”
For the vast majority of his time in office, Biden has focused on being the everyman president, boasting of his ability to work with lawmakers on both sides of the aisle and focusing primarily on attempting to unite the country.
But Biden has, in recent weeks, increasingly targeted the Republican party, telling a crowd gathered during an event in Maryland last Thursday to “vote to literally save democracy once again” in the upcoming midterms. He also compared the ideology of the “extreme MAGA” Republicans, those who continue to support Trump despite his repeated lies about the 2020 election, to “semi-fascism,” a comment that drew ire from members of the GOP and some Democrats alike.
Still, Biden stuck by his statement. When asked by reporters to explain his comment, the president simply said: “You know what I mean.”
When asked about the upcoming speech in Philadelphia, Jean-Pierre stressed Biden “thinks that there is an extremist threat to our democracy.”
“The President has been [as] clear as he can be on that particular piece,” she told reporters, adding Biden believes “MAGA Republicans are the most energized part of the Republican Party” and represent “an extreme threat to our democracy and to our freedom to our rights.”
Biden’s visit will be his second to the Keystone State this week, and he is set to make yet another trip to Pittsburgh on Labor Day to celebrate “the dignity of American workers,” per the White House.
