President Biden addresses United States of America. Video / The White House
US President Joe Biden has given a rare Oval Office address after yesterday’s assassination attempt on Donald Trump, saying “we resolve our differences at the ballot box ... not with bullets”.
Trump has landed in Milwaukee ahead of the Republican National Convention. He’s told The Washington Examiner the reason he wasn’t killed was “that he looked away from the crowd and to a screen with speech notes”.
US President Joe Biden has urged Americans to unify in the wake of an assassination attempt against his opponent Donald Trump, calling on the country to “lower the temperature in our politics” amid a tumultuous presidential campaign in a time of division and anger.
“The political rhetoric in this country has gotten very heated. It’s time to cool it down,” Biden said in an address from the Oval Office.
“Disagreement is inevitable in American democracy. It’s part of human nature,” he added during the speech, his third remarks to the nation in the span of less than 24 hours.
“But politics must never be a literal battlefield, and, God forbid, a killing field.”
Biden has rarely addressed the nation from the Oval Office during his presidency, and he used the solemn setting to signal the seriousness of the moment.
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The remarks were an effort to return to what has long been Biden’s core political strength: a reputation for compassion, moderation and maturity. That image has been eclipsed in recent weeks by one of an 81-year-old President struggling to complete his thoughts at last month’s debate.
During his speech, Biden placed the Trump shooting squarely in a chain of recent violent events, most of which were aimed at Democrats: the 2021 assault on the US Capitol, the plot to kidnap Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, the attack on the husband of former speaker Nancy Pelosi, and various threats against election officials.
In an earlier address from the White House Roosevelt Room on Sunday afternoon, Biden urged Americans not to make assumptions about the shooter’s motives. “We’ll debate and we’ll disagree - that’s not going to change. But we are not going to lose sight of who we are as Americans,” he said.
The President received a briefing from top law enforcement and homeland security officials on the shooting Sunday morning, and he pledged to share more information with the public as the investigation unfolds. He said he had instructed the Secret Service to review the security measures at the rally, where a gunman fired at Trump from a nearby building, and to reexamine the safety protocols for the Republican National Convention, which begins Monday in Milwaukee.
Biden’s careful words and actions underscored his dual role as a President who has warned about political violence and a candidate running against a man targeted by that violence. “The power to change America should always rest in the hands of the people, not in the hands of would-be assassin,” he said in his Oval Office remarks.
The reverberations of Saturday’s shooting, likely to be long-lasting and unpredictable, quickly began to reshape the contours of the 2024 race.
US President Joe Biden has called for unity in the wake of the assassination attempt on Donald Trump. Photo / Getty Images
Biden postponed a scheduled Monday trip to the Lyndon B. Johnson Library in Austin. Vice President Harris delayed a trip to Florida to talk about abortion rights. The Biden-Harris campaign halted a $50 million ad blitz. And Biden’s team strategized privately about how to move forward in the face of an event that occurred at a time when the President was already under pressure to stabilise his candidacy.
The shooting at Trump’s rally late Saturday unfolded just as Biden was attempting to focus his campaign even more sharply on criticizing his Republican opponent, including for his intemperate rhetoric and divisive message, in an effort to move the conversation beyond his rocky performance in the June 27 presidential debate, which has prompted more than 20 congressional Democrats to call on him to end his bid for re-election.
Inside Biden’s campaign, officials spent Sunday trying to plot a path forward for a re-election bid that had largely gone silent since the shooting. On an all-staff call Sunday evening, Jen O’Malley Dillon, Biden’s campaign chair, said there “are no perfect answers” for how to respond to what authorities are investigating as an attempted assassination.
“There’s no like plug-and-play on how to navigate something like this,” she said, according to a source familiar with her comments who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private deliberations. “And all we can do is keep working through it and, you know, lean on each other and stay flexible and, you know, continue to focus on why we’re all here.”
Biden said Sunday evening that he would resume traveling the country this week to make a case for his vision, noting that Republicans would likely be criticizing his record during their confab in Milwaukee.
“That’s how democracy should work,” he said. “We debate and disagree.”
The President planned to travel Monday to Las Vegas, where he is scheduled to address conferences of the NAACP and UnidosUS, a leading Hispanic civil rights organization, later in the week.
Some Democrats said it was important to keep highlighting the contrast with Trump, while also showing sensitivity and compassion. They noted that Trump is set to receive his party’s presidential nomination during the Republican convention.
“This should not keep us from having frank conversations, even partisan conversations, about where we are on the issue contrasts,” said Maria Cardona, a Democratic strategist, who praised both Biden and Trump for measured responses in the hours after the shooting. “We should not feel compelled to bite our tongues in terms of bringing that contrast. We can absolutely bring that contrast without pouring gasoline on the fire of violent political rhetoric.”
Biden campaign officials say the attempted assassination further underscores Biden’s main motivation for running for President, in both 2020 and 2024: saving democracy, ending political violence and uniting the country. If Republicans seek to blame Biden or Democrats for the shooting, the officials said, they will stress that opposition to political violence has long been central to the President’s message - and note that several recent episodes of political violence have been cheered by some on the right.
Republican presidential candidate former President Donald Trump is rushed offstage. Photo / Getty Images
After Biden participates in an interview with NBC on Monday afternoon, his campaign and the Democratic National Committee “will continue drawing the contrast between our positive vision for the future and Trump and Republicans’ backward-looking agenda over the course of the week,” a campaign official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to preview campaign strategy.
On his Truth Social platform, Trump wrote Sunday that “it is more important than ever that we stand United and show our True Character as Americans.”
The two men spoke by phone Saturday after the shooting, in which Trump said a bullet pierced his right ear. The call was “good, short and respectful,” said one White House official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss the private conversation.
Biden cut short his weekend stay in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, to return to the White House on Saturday and began canceling some planned political activities. Harris’s canceled trip would have taken her to Trump’s home turf in Palm Beach County in Florida where she planned to focus on Republicans’ efforts to curtail abortion rights. Biden had planned to visit the Johnson library to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the Civil Rights Act. Aides said the events would be postponed in light of the shooting.
Biden will move ahead with his planned interview with NBC’s Lester Holt on Monday, which will air in prime time as the Republican convention is getting underway.
The push for Biden to pull out appeared to be stalling after Biden held an hour-long news conference Thursday and a raucous rally Friday in which he defiantly declared he would not step aside. Some Democrats have suggested that Saturday’s shooting would further quiet discussion of Biden stepping aside, as political leaders of all stripes face pressure to lower the temperature on their rhetoric.
At Friday’s rally, Biden seized on Trump’s criminal conviction, the accusations of sexual assault and rape against him and the far-right Project 2025 agenda being pushed by the former President’s allies.
He went on to call Trump “a threat to this nation,” highlighting the Capitol insurrection and other acts of political violence he suggested were inspired by the former President.
Republicans have seized on Biden’s messaging in the aftermath of Saturday’s shooting, some asserting without evidence that the President bore responsibility for the incident. Senator JD Vance (Ohio), a potential Trump running mate, was one of several GOP leaders who tried to draw a link between Democrats’ rhetoric and the shooter’s actions Saturday.
“The central premise of the Biden campaign is that President Donald Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs,” Vance wrote on social media after the shooting. “That rhetoric led directly to President Trump’s attempted assassination.”
The shooter’s motives have not been established and remain under investigation.
Trump’s own rhetoric has often been far more explicit. He has amplified posts on social media calling for military tribunals of his enemies and depicted Biden tied up in the back of a pickup truck. He has accused Biden of running a “Gestapo administration” and warned that his own criminal indictment would lead to “potential death and destruction.”
The shooting attempt at least temporarily complicates Biden’s stated plans to take the fight to Trump more directly. Images of Trump’s raised fist and bloodied face have ricocheted across the internet as his supporters – and even some of his critics – have lauded him for his defiant response to the shooting.
In recent private calls with donors and lawmakers before the shooting, Biden promised he would be more aggressive in public. On a call with donors on Monday, when asked what he would do differently in the next debate with Trump, Biden said, “attack, attack, attack, attack”.
In the same call, the President said he was done talking about his politically damaging debate performance. “It’s time to put Trump in the bull’s eye,” he said.
In the aftermath of the shooting, Republicans quickly seized on the comment.
Campaign aides said Biden’s comments referred to a desire to put a harsher spotlight on Trump and Project 2025, an agenda crafted by Trump’s allies that would dramatically reshape the federal government, and were in no way a call for violence.
One of the Project 2025′s own leaders floated the prospect of political violence earlier this month.
“We are in the process of the second American revolution,” Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts warned recently, adding that it “will remain bloodless, if the left allows it to be.”
