This year’s State of the Union address effectively doubled as a campaign launch for President Joe Biden as he sought to highlight the risks of a second term for Donald Trump.
Speaking a day and a half after Trump appeared to wrap up the GOP nomination, Biden put front and center the ways in which the former president could put the lives of those watching the speech in danger.
Throughout the 2020 campaign, Biden framed the race as a “battle for the soul of the nation.” This time, he’s arguing that it’s not just the soul of the nation that’s on the line; it’s the very bodies of those who inhabit it — from their access to health care to their ability to make decisions about when and how to start a family.
The speech came in a week in which former United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley suspended her bid for the Republican nomination, having won just one state on Super Tuesday, while outgoing Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell threw his support behind Trump, the man he once said was “practically and morally responsible” for the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection. McConnell’s falling in line was all the more remarkable given that the attack on the Capitol literally put him in danger.
As in every State of the Union, Biden touched on a laundry list of urgent issues: providing desperately needed aid to Ukraine, curbing the humanitarian crisis at the southern border, ensuring the right to vote, protecting transgender Americans, raising the minimum wage, securing gun safety reform, and more.
But Biden also put an emphasis on healthcare policy during the State of the Union.
As reproductive rights face unrelenting attacks in the post-Roe era, the president emphasized his support for bodily autonomy. He did so as Latorya Beasley, whose in-vitro fertilization treatments were canceled after the recent Alabama Supreme Court ruling, and Kate Cox, who had to leave her home state of Texas for a lifesaving abortion, listened beside the first lady, Jill Biden.
After emphasizing his own support for reproductive freedom, Biden noted that his predecessor was “determined to see Roe v. Wade overturned. He’s the reason it was overturned. In fact, he brags about it. Look at the chaos that has resulted.” He went on to ask lawmakers opposing reproductive rights, “My God, what freedoms will you take away next?”
We already have a preview of what Trump and his allies would do with the leverage of another Trump term. After the Alabama Supreme Court effectively halted IVF — a move only temporarily reversed by a new law in the state — Trump half-heartedly called for some protections.
But The New York Times reports that he’s privately supported a federal abortion ban, and Project 2025 — the transition plan by Trump’s allies at the Heritage Foundation — calls on the Department of Health and Human Services to declassify abortion as health care and reject the approval of medication abortion.
According to recent reporting from Axios, the Biden campaign plans to broadcast Project 2025 and connect the dots between it and Trump’s plans, further highlighting the distance between the two presidential candidates on reproductive rights.
Americans have seen this contrast, not just with Trump, but the Republican party writ large. That’s why, in her rebuttal, Alabama Republican Senator Katie Britt largely strayed away from reproductive rights beyond the in vitro fertilization access her home state’s court threatened, and that her own colleagues in the Senate refused to protect.
Then there’s the Affordable Care Act, known colloquially as Obamacare. Nearly 14 years after its enactment, 59% of American adults have a favorable view of the legislation, according to health policy nonprofit KFF. This year, health insurance enrollment through the Affordable Care Act surged to a record 20 million, nearly a 25% increase from the previous record reached the year before.
The Affordable Care Act was Trump’s white whale throughout his first term in office, as he famously failed to corral Senate Republicans behind a bill to repeal it.
The Affordable Care Act was Trump’s white whale throughout his first term in office, as he famously failed to corral Senate Republicans behind a bill to repeal it. The former president’s opposition to the policy hasn’t wavered in the years since.
Obamacare has been the law of the land for nearly a generation, and the Biden campaign plans to highlight the urgency of protecting it from a second Trump term. Senior communications adviser for Biden-Harris 2024, T.J. Ducklo, recently told Politico that “Joe Biden will protect and expand Obamacare — and Donald Trump has tried to rip it away and promised to try to again if given the chance.”
As Biden himself said during the State of the Union, “Folks, the Affordable Care Act, Obamacare, is still a very big deal. Over one hundred million of you can no longer be denied health insurance because of pre-existing conditions.”
What’s more, the public has experienced firsthand Trump’s ineptitude during a public health crisis. While then-candidate Biden was warning as early as January of 2020 that COVID-19 was a serious threat, Trump repeatedly discouraged the use of mask and continued holding packed campaign rallies. As voting by mail expanded to accommodate Americans’ safety during a global pandemic, Trump used that expansion to sow distrust of our entire election system.
And though it may seem that long wait times are the only thing a doctor’s office and a polling place have in common, there’s strong evidence of a direct correlation between the health of a nation’s people and the health of its democracy on measurements such as infant mortality and overall death rates.
That’s why it matters that Trump and his allies have sought to undermine that democracy. Trump has doubled down on his promise to be a “dictator” on the first day of his administration, and he’s previously suggested that parts of the Constitution should be terminated. Meantime, his allies have already begun challenging thousands of voter registrations in key states, according to The New York Times.
“January 6th and the lies about the 2020 election, and the plots to steal the election, posed the gravest threat to our democracy since the Civil War,” the President said. “But they failed. America stood strong and democracy prevailed. We must be honest, the threat to democracy must be defended.”
On Thursday night, like so many of his predecessors, Biden proclaimed that the state of the union is strong. But now he is also asking voters to grasp the stark contrasts in what just became a two-man race. Until then, everything from actual bodies to the body politic is on shaky ground.
For more thought-provoking insights from Alicia Menendez, Michael Steele and Symone Sanders-Townsend, watch “The Weekend” every Saturday and Sunday at 8 a.m. ET on MSNBC.
