Sept. 6 (UPI) — President Joe Biden continued to take aim at so-called “MAGA Republicans” as he delivered remarks from Pennsylvania and Wisconsin on Monday.
Biden said that the current GOP is “not your father’s Republican Party” as he delivered remarks at the United Steelworkers of America Local 2227 Union Hall in West Mifflin, Pa., for his third visit to Pennsylvania in three days.
He cited the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Va., as the reason he decided to run for president.
“The reason that made me run, I decided, was when you saw those people coming out of the fields down in Virginia carrying torches, with Swastikas chanting the same anti-Semitic bile chanted in Germany in the 30s accompanied by the Ku Klux Klan and the guy that I beat in this last election, when they asked he said ‘There were really fine people on both sides,'” Biden said.
The president said that the United States is at an “inflection point” as he reiterated talking points from his speech in front of Independence Hall on Thursday.
“Democracy is really at stake, you can’t be a democracy when you support violence when you don’t like the outcome of an election, you can’t call yourself a democracy when you don’t in fact count the votes that people legitimately cast … you can’t be a democracy and call yourself one if you continue to do what they’re doing,” he said.
Biden also continued his criticisms of MAGA Republicans in earlier remarks at Laborfest in Milwaukee, saying that “extreme MAGA Republicans have chosen to go backward, full of anger, violence, hate and division.”
He said that Americans must instead “choose a different path forward” while clarifying that his comments did not apply to the entire GOP.
“I want to be very clear up front: Not every Republican is a MAGA Republican,” he said. “Not every Republican embraces that extreme ideology. I know because I’ve been able to work with mainstream Republicans in my whole career.”
Biden went on to say that Republican Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson would seek to put Social Security and Medicare on the “chopping block” if re-elected in November’s midterms.
“The biggest contrast between these MAGA Republicans, the extreme right, the Trumpies … These MAGA Republicans in Congress are coming for your Social Security,” Biden said.
Johnson is facing off against Democratic Wisconsin Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes who Biden referred to as “your next United States senator.”
During the remarks at Laborfest, where he was joined by Wisconsin labor leaders and political figures including Gov. Tony Evers and U.S. Rep. Gwen Moore, Biden also expressed strong support for unions.
“I’m here because of you — the middle class built America, but the unions built the middle class — that’s a fact,” he said. “Laborers are the single greatest technicians in the world. People forget, you go four, five years to school, in an apprentice, build a better product, it lasts longer, it’s cheaper for business, it’s better for the country.”
