Biden warns Trump, 'MAGA' movement threaten American democracy

President Joe Biden launched a wide-ranging attack on Republican Donald Trump on Thursday, warning that his predecessor is a threat to American democracy and drawing a sharp distinction between himself and his likely 2024 election opponent.

To make his most extensive critique of Trump this year, Biden, a Democrat, chose an event to honor the late Republican Senator John McCain of Arizona, a former presidential candidate, fighter pilot and Vietnam prisoner of war who Trump had denounced as "not a war hero."

"There is something dangerous happening in America," Biden said, detailing Trump threats against U.S. officials.

In a speech at the Tempe Center for the Arts in Arizona, a likely battleground state in 2024, Biden noted that Trump had suggested in recent weeks that the chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff deserves to be killed and the Department of Justice should be defunded.

Biden also recalled remarks that Trump reportedly made after he abandoned a plan to visit an American military cemetery outside of Paris in 2018. The Atlantic reported at the time that Trump had called the war dead "suckers" and "losers," comments that Trump denied.