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.
“Tonight I have come here to the place where it all began to speak plainly to the nation about the threats we face,” Biden is expected to say, according to excerpts distributed by the White House. “About the power we have in our own hands to meet those threats. And about the incredible future that lies in front of us if only we choose it.”
“For a long time, we’ve reassured ourselves that American democracy is guaranteed. But it is not. We have to defend it. Protect it. Stand up for it. Each and every one of us,” he’ll later say.
A White House official told Spectrum News that Biden will speak directly to Americans about their role in maintaining democratic values.
“He’s going to talk about how Democrats, independents, mainstream Republicans have to come together and protect and defend our democracy,” White House deputy communications director Kate Berner told Spectrum News on Thursday.
Recent polling shows that such an issue is becoming one of increasing importance to voters. According to an NBC News survey released last month, voters said that “threats to democracy” was the top issue facing the country.
“We’ve seen members of Congress say there’ll be blood in the streets or there’ll be riots,” Berner added, seemingly referencing recent comments made by GOP Sen. Lindsey Graham about possible backlash should former President Donald Trump face prosecution.
“There’s also members of Congress who haven’t accepted the results of free and fair elections,” she continued. “And then there are members of Congress who are throwing away the rule of law. These are all concerns and they’re the kinds of examples that the president will be talking about tonight.”
Biden will also reference former president Donald Trump’s followers and the ideologies that have taken root since his election, specifically the campaign against abortion rights that came to a head this summer.
“MAGA forces are determined to take this country backwards,” he’ll say. “Backwards to an America where there is no right to choose, no right to privacy, no right to contraception, no right to marry who you love.”
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters on Thursday that the speech will not be a “political” speech, despite a number of key races ongoing in Pennsylvania, including elections for governor and U.S. Senate.
She said the remarks would be “optimistic” and about “uniting” the American people, while telling them how he believes the country’s core values are at stake.
“You’ll hear him speak about how he believes we can get through this current moment, this critical moment,” she said.
The core values Biden will speak about, as he laid out in an op-ed published in The Atlantic 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.
House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., will counter-program Biden’s remarks by delivering a speech of his own ahead of the president’s in his birthplace of Scranton, Pennsylvania.
McCarthy, according to a statement, will “talk about what he has heard from the American people this summer regarding rising crime, record high inflation and other hardships brought on by the Democrats’ harmful policies.”
