Biden offers dire warnings about Trump, accuses mainstream GOP of 'deafening' silence

President Joe Biden has issued one of his most dire warnings yet that Donald Trump and his allies are a menace to American democracy

President Joe Biden issued one of his most dire warnings yet that Donald Trump and his allies are a menace to American democracy, declaring Thursday that the former president is more interested in personal power than upholding the nation's core values and suggesting even mainstream Republicans are complicit.

“The silence is deafening,” he said.

During a speech in Arizona celebrating a library to be built honoring his friend and fierce Trump critic, the late Republican Sen. John McCain, Biden repeated one of his key campaign themes, branding the “Make America Great Again” movement as an existential threat to the nation's political system. He's reviving that idea ahead of next year’s presidential race after it buoyed Democrats during last fall’s midterm election, laying out the threat in especially stark terms: "There's something dangerous happening in America right now.”

“We should all remember, democracies don’t have to die at the end of a rifle," Biden said. "They can die when people are silent, when they fail to stand up or condemn threats to democracy, when people are willing to give away that which is most precious to them because they feel frustrated, disillusioned, tired, alienated.”

The 2024 election is still more than a year away, yet Biden’s focus reflects Trump’s status as the undisputed frontrunner for his party’s nomination despite facing four indictments, two of them related to his attempts to overturn Biden’s 2020 victory.

The president's speech was his fourth in a series of addresses on what he sees as threats to democracy, a topic that is a touchstone for him as he tries to remain in office in the face of low approval ratings and widespread concern from voters about his age, 80.

Biden is trying to shift the political narrative to a line of attack he used frequently ahead of last year’s midterms, when Democrats gained a Senate seat and only narrowly lost the House to the GOP. That could be especially tricky given that Biden is facing mounting pressure on Capitol Hill, where House Republicans are holding the first hearing in their impeachment inquiry and where the prospect of a government shutdown is looming — with Trump actively egging one on.

On the first anniversary of Jan. 6, 2021, when a mob of Trump supporters staged an insurrection, Biden visited the Capitol and accused Trump of continuing to hold a “dagger” at democracy’s throat. Biden closed out the summer that year in the shadow of Philadelphia’s Independence Hall, decrying Trumpism as a menace to democratic institutions.

And in November, as voters were casting midterm ballots, Biden again sounded a clarion call to protect democratic institutions.

Advisers see Biden’s continued focus on democracy as both good policy and good politics. Campaign officials have pored over the election results from last November, when candidates who denied the 2020 election results did not fare well in competitive races, and point to polling that showed democracy was a highly motivating issue for voters in 2022.

“Our task, our sacred task of our time, is to make sure that they change not for the worst but for the better, that democracy survives and thrives, not be smashed by a movement more interested in power than a principle,” Biden said. “It’s up to us, the American people.”

Like previous speeches the location for Thursday’s address was chosen for effect. It was near Arizona State University, which houses the McCain Institute, named after the late senator, the 2008 Republican presidential nominee who spent his public life denouncing autocrats around the globe.

The president said that “there is no question that today’s Republican Party is driven and intimidated by MAGA extremists." He pointed to Trump's recent suggestion that Gen. Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff who is stepping down from his post on Friday, should be executed for allegedly treasonous betrayal of him.

“Although I don’t believe even a majority of Republicans think that, the silence is deafening," Biden added. He also noted that Trump has previously questioned those who serve in the American military calling “service members suckers and losers. Was John a sucker?” Biden asked, referring to McCain, who survived long imprisonment in Vietnam.

Then he got even more personal adding, "Was my son Beau, who lived next to a burn pit for a year and came home and died. Was he a sucker for volunteering to serve his country?”

The late senator’s wife, Cindy McCain, said the library, which is still to be built, grew out of bipartisan support from Biden, Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs and her predecessor, Republican Gov. Doug Ducey. She called the future library “a fitting legacy for my husband” and recalled how the Bidens introduced her to her future husband decades ago.

“I am so grateful for that,” Cindy McCain said, her voice cracking.

Republicans competing with Trump for their party's 2024 presidential nomination have largely avoided challenging his election falsehoods, and Biden said Thursday that voters can't let them get away with it.

“Democracy is not a partisan issue," he said. "It’s An American issue.”

A number of candidates who backed Trump’s election lies and were running for statewide offices with some influence over elections — governor, secretary of state, attorney general — lost their midterm races in every presidential battleground state.

Still, in few states does Biden’s message of democracy resonate more than in Arizona, which became politically competitive during Trump’s presidency after seven decades of Republican dominance. Biden's victory made the state a hotbed of efforts to overturn or cast doubt on the results.

Republican state lawmakers used their subpoena power to obtain all the 2020 ballots and vote-counting machines from Maricopa County, then hired Trump supporters to conduct an unprecedented partisan review of the election. The widely mocked spectacleconfirmed Biden’s victory but fueled unfounded conspiracy theories about the election and spurred an exodus of election workers.

In the midterms, voters up and down the ballot rejected Republican candidates who repeatedly denied the results of the 2020 election. But Kari Lake, the GOP gubernatorial candidate, has never conceded her loss to Hobbs and plans to launch a bid for the U.S. Senate. Last year, Republican Senate candidate Blake Masters and Mark Finchem, who ran for secretary of state, also repeated fraudulent election claims in their campaigns.

Indeed, Republicans privately concede that the election denialism rhetoric that dominated their candidates’ message — as well as the specter of Trump — damaged their efforts to retain the governor’s mansion and flip a hotly contested Senate seat, according to Republican officials who worked in statewide races last cycle.

Arizona Rep. Ruben Gallego, who is seeking the Democratic nomination in next year’s Senate race, said a democracy-focused message is particularly important to two critical blocs of voters in the state: Latinos and veterans, both of whom Gallego said are uniquely affected by election denialism and the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection.

"You know, we come from countries and experiences where democracy is very corrupt, and many of us are only one generation removed from that, but we’re close enough to see how bad it can be," Gallego said. "And so Jan. 6 actually was particularly jarring, I think, to Latinos.”

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Weissert reported from Washington.