Biden to speak Thursday at Independence Hall
WASHINGTON — President Joe Biden is set to use a prime-time address Thursday to frame the upcoming midterm elections as part of an ongoing battle for the “soul of the nation” — a reprise of his 2020 campaign theme.
White House officials said that in the speech at Independence Hall in Philadelphia, less than 10 weeks before the midterms, Biden will hark back to the 2017 white supremacist protest in Charlottesville, Va., which he says brought him out of political retirement to challenge Trump.
“The president thinks that there is an extremist threat to our democracy,” said White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre on Wednesday. “It’s not stopping. It’s continuing.”
Biden allies stressed that while the president was set to condemn “ultra-MAGA” Republicans, he was not rejecting the entirety of the GOP and would use his remarks to call on traditional Republicans to join him in condemning Trump and his adherents.
Still, he faces a balancing act, as more than 74 million Americans voted for Trump in 2020.
Biden’s appearance is being billed as an official, taxpayer-funded event, a mark of how the president views defeating the Trump agenda as much as a policy aim as a political one.
The major broadcast television networks are not expected to carry the address live.
Jean-Pierre said Biden was holding the event in prime time because he believes “we need to save the core values of our of our country.”
House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy announced he would speak in Scranton on Thursday afternoon on “Biden’s assault on the soul of America,” accusing the president of planning to “continue to disparage hard-working Americans.”
“Joe Biden is the divider-in-chief and epitomizes the current state of the Democrat Party: one of divisiveness, disgust, and hostility towards half the country,” said RNC Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel.
Biden’s trip to Philadelphia will be one of three presidential visits to the state within a week, a sign of its importance in the midterms, with competitive Senate and governor’s races. Trump will have a rally there this weekend.
The White House hopes to use the Philadelphia speech to unite familiar themes of Biden’s presidency under one banner: holding out bipartisan legislative wins on guns and infrastructure as evidence that democracies “can deliver,” pushing back on “extreme” GOP policies on guns and abortion that are out of step with most people’s views, and rejecting efforts to undermine confidence in the nation’s election or diminish its standing abroad.
