Biden says Trump’s Maga movement ‘threatens’ democracy

Donald Trump and his Make America Great Again (Maga) movement represent “an extremism that threatens the very foundations” of the US nation, Joe Biden has warned.

“Maga forces are determined to take this country backwards,” the US president said during a speech in Philadelphia yesterday. “They live not in the light of truth but in the shadow of lies”, he added.

Biden painted a “dark portrait of his political opponents” during the address, which “comes months ahead of midterm elections that will determine control of Congress”, said CNN. The “majority of Republicans” do not embrace the “extreme ideology” of Maga supporters, he continued, but the party continues to be “dominated, driven and intimidated” by Trump and the movement.

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These Trump Republicans “thrive on chaos” and “don’t respect the Constitution” or the rule of law, Biden told an audience at Independence Hall, where the US Declaration of Independence was signed. Instead, Maga forces “promote authoritarian leaders and they fan the flames of political violence”, he claimed.

Fox News accused the president of continuing “a recent pattern of increasingly aggressive and divisive broadsides against his political opponents” in the run-up to the elections.

According to The Guardian’s Washington D.C. bureau chief David Smith, Biden began his presidency “convinced that his authoritarian-minded predecessor” would “fade away”, but has since “come to understand that Trump’s malign influence still runs deep”.

The White House has insisted that the president’s warning about political extremism was not linked to the midterms, which are less than 70 days away. But USA Today’s White House correspondent Joey Garrison pointed out that Biden “was speaking in a crucial battleground state that could decide control of the Senate”.