Say what you will, but President Joe Biden knows his audience.
"If you’re tired, you probably watched my address last night," Biden said, drawing a quick laugh from a friendly audience at Strath Haven Middle School in Wallingford, Pennsylvania, a suburb of Philadelphia, on Friday night.
Less than a day removed from the 2024 State of the Union address, what will likely be one of his largest audiences of the year, Biden immediately hopped back on the campaign trail, stopping in Pennsylvania before a planned speech in Atlanta on Saturday.
"I got my usual warm reception from Congress and Marjorie Taylor Greene," Biden said, recalling the far-right Congresswoman who confronted the president as he strolled to the lectern. And Greene’s right-wing "MAGA Republican" contemporaries — including former President Donald Trump — he said, are "trying to take away our freedoms."
His Friday night speech was, in many ways, a greatest-hits version of his State of the Union address — a celebration of the work he’s proud of, and a promise that he will build on that work in the months leading up to the November election, and into a second term.
Biden bragged about his administration’s actions to reduce prescription drug prices for Medicare recipients, and called for capping insulin at $35 a month, as well as drug prices across the board. He promised to expand Obamacare and defend it from folks seeking to repeal it.
The president also talked about tweaking the tax code to make it fairer for everyday Americans — and specifically raising taxes on billionaires.
"Big corporations will finally have to pay their fair share. No really, this is just fairness. It’s about fairness and decency," Biden said. The middle class, he said, is the "heart and soul and sinew of the country. If you focus on them, give them an even chance, the poor have a way up and the wealthy still do very, very well," before adding, though he is a capitalist, that "capitalism, when it engages in non-competition, it ends up being stealing."
Just like Thursday’s address, Biden repeatedly evoked Trump — by inference and by title, and starting today, by name.
Trump, he said, is seeking to take away freedoms and to boost his relationships with dictators. He mentioned that Trump is meeting with Viktor Orban, the right-wing Prime Minister of Hungary. Orban, who has fomented authoritarianism, ten years ago gave a speech decrying what he called "liberal democracy," building nationalism and stamping out opposition within the country.
"Now I’ve spent almost 200 hours with the leaders of Europe, heads of state," Biden said. "Know what everyone says to me, virtually, except Orban? As we leave these meetings, they’ve grabbed my arm, pulled me aside and say, he can’t win again — that their country, [their] democracy is at stake."
Biden’s speech Friday night was more off the cuff than the State of the Union address, and had fewer Republican hecklers for him to spar with, which doesn’t always play to his strengths. He stumbled over his words twice early on in the speech when one line meandered from Jan. 6 to discussing a guest last night dealing with in vitro fertilization in Alabama. He also tripped over another, celebrating the electoral power of women in America, pausing to collect himself before recovering the thought.
Yet it seemed, like the State of the Union address, he became more capable as the speech went on and he fell into a groove. By the speech's end, he was responding to — and thanking — audience members who calling out to him.
Biden will continue his campaign tour tomorrow, stopping in Atlanta, as he runs through 2020 swing states that helped deliver him to the White House four years ago.