By Trevor Hunnicutt, Jarrett Renshaw and Steve Holland
WASHINGTON (Reuters) -U.S. President Joe Biden will ask Americans to fight back against Republican extremism threatening the country’s democratic foundations on Thursday in a speech ramping up attacks on politicians aligned with former President Donald Trump.
Biden will attack “MAGA forces” – those people devoted to Trump’s Make America Great Again agenda – as “determined to take this country backwards” to a time without a right to abortion, privacy, contraception or same-sex marriage, according to excerpts of the speech.
“For a long time, we’ve reassured ourselves that American democracy is guaranteed,” Biden will say. “But it is not. We have to defend it. Protect it. Stand up for it. Each and every one of us.”
The prime-time speech in Philadelphia, the birthplace of American democracy, is part of a sharp turn for Biden as midterm congressional elections approach. The president is increasingly concerned about anti-democratic trends in the Republican Party, as well as the need to repel an onslaught by the party in November ahead of his own 2024 re-election bid, aides say.
After devoting much of his energy in 2022 to high inflation at home and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and enduring two bouts of COVID-19 over the summer, Biden has begun lashing out at Trump-aligned Republicans in recent days.
At a fundraiser last week in Maryland, Biden likened “an extreme MAGA philosophy” to “semi-fascism.” On Tuesday, in the first of three visits within a week to the political battleground state of Pennsylvania, Biden assailed Republican threats against the FBI after a search of Trump’s Florida home as “sickening.” He did not mention Trump by name.
In Philadelphia, Biden will discuss “what is at stake in this moment and how we and how he is going to continue to protect equality and democracy,” said White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre.
House of Representatives Republican leader Kevin McCarthy accused Biden of ignoring crime and inflation to criticize his fellow citizens.
“Instead of trying to bring our country together to solve these challenges, President Biden has chosen to divide, demean, and disparage his fellow Americans – simply because they disagree with his policies,” McCarthy will say in Biden’s hometown of Scranton, Pennsylvania, before the president’s speech, according to excerpts of his remarks.
A Democratic fundraiser said donors are closely watching the next few months to gauge whether to back Biden in a 2024 presidential run. Some have already decided that Biden, 79, should step aside to make way for fresh leadership, others want to see if he can move the needle.
“If we can pull it off and retain the Senate, then there will be enough voices saying he has earned it and pave the way for re-election,” said a senior Democratic official. “If we don’t, the overwhelming sentiment will be ‘Pass the torch.’”
FREE ELECTIONS IN DANGER?
Biden will deliver the remarks in Independence Hall, where the U.S. Declaration of Independence and Constitution were adopted.
Historians, legal scholars and some elected officials have cast the stakes in much starker terms than Biden’s political future, saying the country’s free elections and commitment to the rule of law hang in the balance.
They say losing Congress would not only make Biden a lame-duck president, but also turn over control of certifying the results of the next presidential election to Trump sympathizers, some of whom never accepted Biden’s 2020 victory and who have pledged to overhaul voting systems.
Biden’s speech on Thursday night will echo a campaign pledge to restore the “soul of the nation” and, by implication, purge the values associated with Trump. In the nearly two years since Biden was elected, Republican voters have mostly backed candidates aligned with the former president; more than half say they believe Trump rightfully won the election.
Confronted by threats after Trump’s loss, one in five election workers polled this year said they may quit before the next presidential election.
TRUMP AS UNIFIER – FOR DEMOCRATS
Absent the constant presence of Trump, many top Democrats believe they have lacked the message that knit together the geographically and racially diverse coalition of voters that elected Biden in 2020.
Support for Biden among all those key groups has cratered since his 2021 inauguration, with the president’s overall public approval falling near the lows of his term in office, to 38%, in a Reuters/Ipsos poll completed on Tuesday.
Those voters are increasingly anxious about the state of the country, inflamed by the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot hearings and an ongoing criminal investigation into Trump’s handling of classified documents that has led to violent threats against the FBI.
In focus groups conducted by Democrats, these worries have rivaled inflation and the economy as top concerns, according to two people who have conducted such research for Democrats.
Some expressed disappointment that Biden has not done more to address those concerns.
A person working with the Democratic Senate Majority political action committee, who declined to be identified, said they fear the White House will put Biden too front-and-center in upcoming weeks. “We need this to be a referendum on extremism, not Joe Biden,” the Democrat said.
(Reporting by Trevor Hunnicutt, Jarrett Renshaw and Steve Holland in WashingtonAdditional reporting by Jeff Mason in WashingtonEditing by Heather Timmons, Jonathan Oatis and Matthew Lewis)