Biden confronts extremism at perilous moment for presidency, country By Reuters

© Reuters. U.S. President Joe Biden delivers remarks on gun crime and his "Safer America Plan" during an event in Wilkes Barre, Pennsylvania, U.S., August 30, 2022. REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque

By Trevor Hunnicutt, Jarrett Renshaw and Steve Holland

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -U.S. President Joe Biden will ask Americans to push back against extremism at the ballot box in a prime-time speech on Thursday as he ramps up attacks on politicians aligned with Donald Trump.

The speech in Philadelphia, the birthplace of American democracy, is part of a sharp turn for Biden as midterm congressional elections approach. It reflects a growing sense of urgency about anti-democratic trends in the opposition party, as well as the need to repel a Republican onslaught in November and build support for his 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 begun lashing out at Trump-aligned Republicans in recent days.

At a fundraiser last week in Maryland, Biden likened "an extreme MAGA philosophy" - standing for Trump's Make America Great Again movement - to "semi-fascism." On Tuesday, in the first of three visits within a week to the political battleground state of Pennsylvania, Biden assailed threats against the FBI after a search of Trump's Florida home as "sickening." He taunted Republican members of Congress who refused to condemn the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. He did not mention Trump by name.

In Philadelphia, Biden will "speak about how the core values of this nation - our standing in the world, our democracy - are at stake," according to a White House official previewing the speech.

"He will make clear who is fighting for those rights, fighting for those freedoms, and fighting for our democracy," said the official, who declined to be identified.

Ahead of the speech, House of Representatives Republican leader Kevin McCarthy accused Biden of ignoring crime and inflation "to disparage hard-working Americans." He will speak in Biden's hometown of Scranton, Pennsylvania, before the president's speech.

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 should step aside to make way for fresh leadership, but 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 reelection," 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 agreed.

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, it could turn control over 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 local voting systems.

Biden ran for president on restoring the "soul of the nation" and, by implication, purging the values associated with Trump. Instead, Republican voters have mostly backed candidates aligned with the former president and more than half say they believe he 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.

Biden has been planning the speech for a long time and is expected to speak for about half an hour, a senior White House official told reporters.

While he will talk about the direct threat to democracy from extremist Trump supporters and MAGA Republicans, the official said, "This is not a speech about the former president.

"It’s an optimistic speech. It is a speech about where we as a nation can go as a democracy."

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 dispersed 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 FBI agents who searched the former president's Mar-a-Lago home.

In focus groups conducted by Democrats, these worries have rivaled inflation and the economy as top concerns for many voters, according to two people who have conducted such research for Democrats.

Some of those people have expressed disappointment that Biden has not done more to address those concerns, giving Democrats more confidence that an anti-extremism message from the White House would appeal.

A person working with the Democratic Senate Majority PAC 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.

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