President Joe Biden delivered a 24-minute nationally televised speech Thursday night. He was deliberately positioned in front of uniformed Marines, with ominous red background lighting, as he painted his political foes as “MAGA forces.”
He called them a threat to the “soul of the nation.”
A pair of uniformed Marine sentries saluted President Biden and First Lady Jill Biden as they walked to the stage. There, Biden spoke in front of intentionally designed imagery consisting of glowing red lighting, the American flag, and directly in front of the uniformed Marines. He declared his 2020 political rival Donald Trump and “MAGA Republicans” as “an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our Republic.”
The appearance of uniformed service members at a politically charged event is rare and typically criticized as politicization of the military.
With the image setting the tone for his speech, Biden said he came “to speak as plainly as I can about the threats we face, about the power we have in our own hands to meet these threats.”