President Joe Biden warned that American democracy is in grave peril by Republican forces loyal to former president Donald Trump, who “fan the flames” of political violence and extremism in the pursuit of power at any cost.
The 24-minute unsparing speech was part of a newly aggressive line of attack Biden has unleashed on Republicans ahead of the midterm elections. The Democratic party is currently enjoying a brightening political outlook, due to a string of big legislative wins and continuing and mounting public backlash to the Supreme Court’s decision to end the constitutional right to abortion.
In the speech, Biden said the United States was in a continued battle for the “soul of the nation,” and blamed Trump for stoking a movement filled with election deniers and people calling for political violence. He did go out of his way to declare not all Republicans are extremists.
Biden made the prime-time address from Philadelphia on Tuesday night, the city where American democracy was born centuries before. The remarks were delivered at Independence Hall.
It was reprising a theme that animated his campaign for the White House in 2020 to frame the stakes of the November elections as an existential choice between his party’s agenda and Republicans’ “extreme Maga ideology”
“Donald Trump and the Maga Republicans represent an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our Republic,” Biden said.
Biden emphasized that not all, not even most, Republicans are “Maga extremists.” But Biden said there is no question that the current Republican Party is “dominated, driven and intimidated” by Trump.
These Trump Republicans “thrive on chaos” and “don’t respect the constitution” or the rule of law.
The Maga extremists “promote authoritarian leaders and they fan the flames of political violence”, Biden continued, adding that they believe there are only two possible outcomes to an election: either they win or they were cheated.
“You can’t love your country only when you win,” Biden said to booming applause.
The protection of democracy has been a through the line of Biden’s rise to the White House, which he has said was motivated by the racist violence in Charlottesville. Though he pledged to build national unity as president, the forces unleashed by Trump’s lie of a stolen 2020 election have only gained strength in the nearly two years that Biden has been in office.
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