J.D. Vance, the GOP candidate for Senate in Ohio, accused President Joe Biden of dividing the country and “declaring war” on those who do not agree with him.
Vance criticized Biden’s prime-time speech at Independence Hall in Philadelphia on Thursday, claiming the president broke his campaign promise of uniting the country. The Senate hopeful specifically pointed to comments made by Biden in which the president warned of threats against democracy from right-wing “MAGA forces.”
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“I just can’t imagine anything more divisive and more dangerous coming from a president who if he said anything during his campaign, it’s that he would unite the country. This is not uniting at all,” Vance said on Fox News’s The Ingraham Angle. “He’s declaring war effectively on half of the country, not just Donald Trump. I understand he doesn’t like Donald Trump — but on Donald Trump’s voters, and I can’t imagine a president ever doing that in American history.”
Midterm elections are usually viewed as an assessment of how well a president is doing, typically resulting in a shift of power in Congress if a president’s favorability is low. This could spell trouble for Biden, who has been plagued with low ratings over the last several months.
However, Biden sought to flip the script during his Thursday address, warning voters that democracy is at stake — largely because of Trump, according to the president.
“MAGA forces are determined to take this country backwards — backwards to an America where there is no right to choose, no right to privacy, no right to contraception, no right to marry who you love,” Biden said.
Vance argued the new strategy is ineffective, pointing to Biden’s 40-plus years in the U.S. government.
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“I don’t think it’s a winning strategy at all because it ignores the fact that Joe Biden has effectively been in the position of leadership for 30 years in this country, and what has happened?” Vance said. “In 30 years … we have had rising suicide rates. We have rising mortality rates such that the life expectancy of the country has come down. We’ve lost a long-term battle against the Chinese, and Joe Biden is actually taking us in the wrong direction and fighting us back.”
The White House said Biden’s address would be optimistic and apolitical. The speech amounted to a continuation of the president’s 2020 “battle for the soul” of the country campaign. That slogan emerged after the deadly 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, which was the event that spurred Biden to run for president in 2020.
