President Biden warned Sunday of the risks of political violence in the United States following the attempted assassination of former President Trump on Saturday, saying: “It's time to calm down.”
In a prime-time national address from the Oval Office, Biden said political passions can run high, but “we must never descend into violence.”
“There is no place in America for this kind of violence, for any kind of violence. Ever. Period. Without exception,” Biden said. “We cannot allow this violence to become normalized.”
Biden spoke for about five minutes from the Oval Office. He noted that the Republican National Convention was opening in Milwaukee on Monday, while he himself would be traveling around the country to campaign for re-election.
He said passions would run high on both sides and the stakes in the election were enormous.
“We can do this,” Biden implored, asserting that the nation was founded on a democracy that gave reason and balance the opportunity to prevail over brute force. “American democracy, where arguments are made in good faith. American democracy, where the rule of law is respected. Where decency and dignity and fair play are not just quaint notions, they are living, breathing realities.”
Earlier on Sunday, Biden condemned the attempted assassination of his predecessor, Trump, as “contrary to everything we stand for as a nation” and said he was ordering an independent security review into how such an attack could have occurred.
He called for the country to “come together as one nation,” promised a “thorough and swift” investigation and asked the public not to “make assumptions” about the shooter’s motives or affiliations.
The president said he had also ordered the Secret Service to review all security measures for the Republican National Convention. Hours later, Audrey Gibson-Cicchino, the Secret Service coordinator for the convention, said the weekend attack on Trump did not prompt any changes to the agency's security plan for the event and that officials “are fully prepared.”
In his remarks, Biden called the attack on Trump “something that does not represent who we are as a nation.”
“This is not something that is done in America and we cannot allow this to happen,” he said. “Unity is the most difficult goal to achieve, but nothing is more important than that right now.”
The president said he and first lady Jill Biden were praying for the family of Corey Comperatore, a former fire chief who was fatally shot during Trump's rally Saturday night in Butler, Pennsylvania.
“He was protecting his family from bullets,” Biden said. “God bless him.”
The president also said he had a “brief but good conversation” with Trump in the hours after the shooting and said he was “sincerely grateful” that the former president is “well and recovering.”
Trump, who has called for national resilience since the shooting, posted on his social media account after Biden's comments: “LET'S UNITE AMERICA!”
In reality, achieving unity will be much harder, especially amid a bitter presidential campaign. Biden’s team is grappling with how to calibrate the path forward after the weekend attack on the very person he is trying to defeat in the November election.
Biden, who has made a point of calling Trump a threat to democracy and the nation’s founding principles, put a temporary pause on such political messaging. Shortly after the attack Saturday night, Biden’s reelection campaign froze “all outbound communications” and was working to pull its television ads.
The president also postponed a planned trip to Texas on Monday, where he was to speak at the 60th anniversary of the Civil Rights Act at the Lyndon B. Johnson presidential library. An NBC News interview between Biden and anchor Lester Holt will now take place at the White House, rather than in Texas as initially planned.
The Biden campaign said that after the NBC interview airs Monday night, it and the Democratic National Committee will “continue to draw the contrast” with Trump throughout the course of the Republican convention, though it is unclear when the ads will resume.
Biden is also scheduled to travel to Las Vegas, which will include a campaign rally on Wednesday. Vice President Kamala Harris on Tuesday postponed her campaign trip to Florida, where she was scheduled to meet with Republican women.
Meanwhile, Trump announced that he was moving forward with his plans to go to Milwaukee and the Republican convention, where there will surely be strong criticism of Biden and the Democrats.
The weekend's events were just the latest disruption in a campaign that has been extraordinarily hectic in recent weeks.
Biden’s shaky performance in the June 27 debate so spooked his own party that some of his top allies and donors turned against him, and nearly 20 Democratic members of Congress called on the president to drop out of the race immediately. Amid growing doubts about whether he was fit for a second term, Biden and his top advisers have been scrambling to salvage his campaign by adding events around the country and more aggressively criticizing Trump.
Saturday's attack disrupted — at least for now — that counteroffensive on the eve of the Republican convention.
The campaign also hopes that Sunday’s Oval Office address will allow Biden to further emphasize his point about unity while also demonstrating leadership that can appease nervous critics within his own party.
“We will debate and we will disagree, that’s not going to change,” Biden said in his afternoon remarks. “But we will not lose sight of who we are as Americans.”
While investigators are still in the early stages of determining what happened and why, some Biden critics are slamming the president for telling donors on a private call Monday that “it's time to put Trump on the spot.”
A person familiar with those comments said the president was trying to show that Trump had managed to get away with a light public agenda after last month’s debate while the president himself faced intense scrutiny. The person spoke on condition of anonymity to be able to speak more freely about private conversations.
On the call with donors, Biden said: “I have one job and that is to beat Donald Trump… I am absolutely confident that I am the best person to be able to do it.”
He continued: “So, we’re done talking about the debate. It’s time to put Trump in the spotlight. He’s gotten away with doing nothing for the last 10 days except riding around in his golf cart, bragging about results he didn’t get… Anyway, I’m not going to talk about his golf game.”
Weissert and Miller write for the Associated Press.
