Biden to press attack on MAGA, GOP in Philadelphia speech

President Biden is expected to ramp up his attacks on a major part of the electorate — MAGA Republicans — in a primetime address in Philadelphia Thursday evening that comes just 10 weeks before the midterm elections.

Biden’s 8 p.m. campaign-style rally at Independence Hall will be the second trip he’s made to the swing state this week after laying into Republicans in Wilkes-Barre over the Jan. 6 Capitol attacks and for condemnation of the FBI in the raid on President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate.

“It’s sickening to see the new attacks on the FBI, threatening the life of law enforcement and their families, for simply carrying out the law and doing their job,” Biden told supporters Tuesday.

In recent weeks, Biden has been trying to frame the November elections as a contest against Republicans who he claims have turned on law enforcement after traditionally running on a law-and-order platform and to emphasize that Democrats are not for defunding the police, despite calls to do just that from some progressive Democratic leaders, including governors and mayors.

“You can’t be pro-law enforcement and pro-insurrection. I’m opposed to defunding the police. I’m also opposed to defunding the FBI,” he said in Wilkes-Barre.

The potentially divisive speech comes after Biden — who came into office promising to unite the nation — likened MAGA supporters to “semi-fascists,” and a new poll found that the political divide has grown so wide under his watch that two in five Americans think a second civil war is possible.

“It’s not just Trump, it’s the entire philosophy that underpins the — I’m going to say something, it’s like semi-fascism,” he said at a Democratic fundraiser last week in Maryland.

He implored members of his party to vote in the midterms against MAGA.

“We’re at a serious moment in our nation’s history. The MAGA Republicans don’t just threaten our personal rights and economic security, they’re a threat to our very democracy. They refuse to accept the will of the people, they embrace political violence,” Biden said in Rockville.

Republican Gov. John Sununu of New Hampshire called on Biden to apologize for the remark, saying it was “horribly insulting” to millions of Republicans across the country.

“The fact that the president would go out and just insult half of America, because, effectively, half of America votes Republican, half of America ultimately votes Democrat,” Sununu said on CNN’s “State of the Union.”

At the speech in the City of Brotherly Love, Biden will speak out about the white supremacists who converged on Charlottesville, Va., in 2017 — an attack that he said prompted him to come out of retirement and challenge Trump for the presidency.

White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said at Wednesday’s briefing that Biden will press that message in his Philadelphia address because he believes “we need to continue to be vigilant.”

“What the president believes, which is a reason to have this in primetime, is that there are an overwhelmingly amount of Americans — majority of Americans — who believe that we need to continue — we need to save the core values of our — of our country,” she told reporters.