President Biden, in an effort to rile up his base as part of a weeklong assault on a Republican opposition that he has vilified as un-American, will use to the backdrop of the Independence Hall at Philadelphia for a speech in television prime time Thursday about what the White House calls the “battle for the soul of the nation.”

Addressing an audience outside the building where both the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution were born, Mr. Biden will, according to the White House, address how Americans’ “rights and freedoms are still under attack” and make clear “who is fighting for those rights, fighting for those freedoms, and fighting for our democracy.”

With the pivotal midterm elections only two months away and the fall campaign season kicking off in earnest after the Labor Day holiday, Mr. Biden has spent the week tarnishing his Republican opposition as “semi-fascist” and singling out congressional supporters of President Trump for stoking division in the electorate.  

During a speech earlier this week at Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, the 46th president lashed out at Republicans in Congress such as Senator Graham of South Carolina, who warned that there would be rioting if the 45th president is prosecuted following the search and retrieval of classified documents from his Mar-a-Lago estate.

“It’s sickening to see the new attacks on the FBI, threatening the life of law enforcement agents and their families for simply carrying out the law and doing their job,” Mr. Biden said.

In the same speech, he accused the former president and his supporters of following an “extreme MAGA philosophy,” choosing “to go backwards, full of anger, violence, hate, and division.”

Mr. Biden’s speech will be met with a “prebuttal” of sorts from the House minority leader, Kevin McCarthy, who is campaigning for a Republican House candidate in the president’s hometown of Scranton, Pennsylvania, on Thursday.

At an event for Jim Bognet, who is challenging Democratic incumbent Matt Cartwright in Pennsylvania’s 8th congressional district, Mr. McCarthy will “talk about what he has heard from the American people this summer regarding rising crime, record high inflation and other hardships brought on by the Democrats’ harmful policies,” according to his office.

Expecting more harsh language from the president, Mr. McCarthy will reportedly refer to Mr. Biden’s “assault on the soul of America” and attempts to disparage “hard-working Americans” with his anti-MAGA messaging.

“He does not understand the soul of America,” Mr. McCarthy said in an appearance on Fox News Thursday morning. Americans “want a stronger, safer, more prosperous America and all he does is vilify them.”

White House officials said Thursday’s event, an official one paid for by taxpayers, will lay out the president’s view that the nation is at a similar crossroads to the one it faced when Mr. Biden came out of retirement to run against Mr. Trump in 2020. It is not expected to be televised by the major networks.

“The president thinks that there is an extremist threat to our democracy,” the White House press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierrem said Wednesday. “It’s not stopping. It’s continuing.”