Biden hoped to be a peacemaker. Now, he knows he must be a warrior.

[BidenPresident]

So Biden the peacemaker gave way to Biden the scrapper on behalf of a threatened democracy. He reached for the most dramatic metaphor available to him in expressing just how irreconcilable our differences have become. “Not since President Lincoln and the Civil War,” he declared, “have freedom and democracy been under assault at home as they are today.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/03/10/biden-state-of-the-union-2024-warrior/