President Biden is hoping that his party can maintain control of Congress and deliver a forceful rebuke to former President Donald J. Trump and his followers.Credit...Doug Mills/The New York Times
WASHINGTON — President Biden likes to say there is nothing America cannot do if the country is united and its rival parties are willing to work together.
But with just two months until the midterm elections, Mr. Biden is purposely spending less time hailing the virtues of compromise and more time calling out dangers to democracy — using some of the sharpest and most combative language of his presidency.
He has accused Republicans of embracing “semi-fascism” by paying fealty to former President Donald J. Trump. He has blasted the party for being “full of anger, violence, hate and division.” And he has warned that the danger from Republicans loyal to Mr. Trump went far beyond differences in policy.
“They’re a threat to our very democracy,” he said of a party that he has spent a half-century working with to find common ground. “They refuse to accept the will of the people. They embrace political violence.”
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After weeks of internal White House strategy sessions, the president and his aides have devised a confrontational election-season approach that focuses on Mr. Biden’s accomplishments coupled with an aggressive political assault on the G.O.P., including the poll-tested phrase he began using this spring: “ultra-MAGA Republicans.”
Now, with Mr. Trump once again at the center of a criminal investigation, this time over his handling of classified documents, Mr. Biden has seized the moment to press a case that voters cannot risk a return to a party in the thrall of the former president.
As the campaign season become more intense, Mr. Biden plans to deliver a prime-time speech on Thursday in Philadelphia in which aides say he will argue that Americans are in the grips of a “battle for the soul of the nation,” returning to a theme he has often used to describe his motivation for becoming a presidential candidate. Recent events have made the speech more urgent for the president, but a Democratic official said Mr. Biden had been thinking of delivering the address since early summer.
The speech will also be an opportunity for Mr. Biden to focus on falling gas prices, a booming job market and legislative victories on climate change, drug prices, infrastructure improvements and veterans’ health care.
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But Mr. Biden is leaning into more political attacks, aides and allies said, in part because of what he sees as a growing embrace of violent political speech by Republicans and a threat to the democratic process of governing. The aides said he was dismayed by the number of Trump-backed election deniers who have won Republican primaries for governor or secretary of state across the country.