Biden to deliver major speech on democracy in election’s closing days

President Joe Biden will deliver a speech in the shadow of the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday night, warning about escalating threats against the nation’s democracy.

Biden’s speech will come in the wake of the brutal beating of the husband of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and against the backdrop of several Republican election deniers standing a chance to win in next week’s midterms.

It’s become a familiar theme for Biden, who delivered a stark message in September about extreme Republicans challenging the foundations of democracy. He also has repeatedly said that he launched his presidential campaign because he felt then-President Donald Trump was tearing the nation’s very fabric.

The White House had not yet released more details about the speech, save that it will be delivered at 7 p.m. at Union Station, the train terminal just blocks from Congress.

Biden’s advisers had hoped to make his closing campaign argument about economy and inflation but could not ignore the confluence of dark conspiracies that have further tested the nation’s stability.

Since the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol, government and law enforcement officials have warned about a surge in political violence, fears that only grew as Election Day approached.

Those worries were borne out by Friday’s brutal assault of the speaker’s 82-year-old husband in the couple’s San Francisco home. The suspect, 42-year-old David DePape, who dwelled in far-right online conspiracy theories, attacked Paul Pelosi with a hammer, fracturing his skull. Authorities said DePape told police he aimed to hold the speaker hostage while breaking her knees.

And that violence has been fueled by far-right conspiracy theories, which Biden argues have been allowed to fester because some Republican deniers of the 2020 election have amplified hate speech.

Biden has frequently returned to the theme of needing to protect “the soul of the nation,” the centerpiece of his speech in Philadelphia delivered just before the unofficial Labor Day kickoff of the general election season. The speech Wednesday night in Washington will act as a sort of bookend, with the president trying to impress upon voters that their bottom lines aren’t the only things at stake in these midterms.

In Philadelphia, Biden took square aim at so-called MAGA Republicans who refuse to honor 2020 election results and who have espoused violence as a legitimate means of political discourse.

“As I stand here tonight, equality and democracy are under assault. We do no favor to pretend otherwise,” Biden declared then. “We have to be honest with each other and ourselves: Too much of what is happening in our country today is not normal.”

Biden has declared the foundation of his presidency was to prove that democracies could still deliver for their people and stand up to rising autocracies across the globe. He vowed to run to heal the wounds opened by Trump’s term and has grown deeply dismayed, aides said, by the political polarization that has only grown during his own time in the White House.

White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre on Wednesday stressed that Biden was not singling out all Republicans but the “pro-insurrectionist” forces within the GOP, saying they have been “very clear about pushing and peddling the big lie [and] peddling dangerous conspiracy theories.”

Though polls suggest voters worry about the future of the nation’s democracy, those concerns badly trail fears about the economy and inflation. When mapping out the president’s final weeks of the campaign, aides had planned for Biden to stay the course and center his closing argument largely on pocketbook issues.

But now he will need to strike a balancing act and warn against the dark forces of disinformation and violence, aides said.

Historical trends suggest the party which controls the White House suffers during the midterms. But while Democrats’ hopes were bolstered this summer in the wake of the Supreme Court decision overturning federal abortion protections, the final stage of the campaign has been dominated by fears about crime and the economy, issues that tend to benefit Republicans.

Most Democrats privately believe that the House will be lost and that maintaining control of the Senate is a toss-up. Biden has largely stayed on the campaign sidelines but will plunge into the foray this week with stops in Pennsylvania, Illinois, New Mexico and California.