Biden asks America to ‘lower the temperature’ after Trump shooting

WASHINGTON — President Joe Biden said in a prime-time Oval Office address Sunday that the nation needed to “lower the temperature in our politics,” saying that he deplored the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump and feared for the direction of the country’s politics.

“We cannot, we must not, go down this road in America,” he said, using the backdrop of the office for only the third time in his presidency. “There is no place in America for this kind of violence, for any violence, ever. Period. No exceptions. We can’t allow this violence to be normalized.”

“The power to change America,” he said, “should always rest in the hands of the people, not in the hands of a would-be assassin.”

The president’s six-minute speech — delivered from behind the Resolute Desk, which has been used by almost every president since Rutherford B. Hayes in 1880 — came just a day before Trump is set to attend his party’s nominating convention in Milwaukee. Republicans said the convention would proceed as planned, and Trump flew to Milwaukee on Sunday afternoon, vowing to remain “defiant in the face of wickedness.”

In his short speech, Biden said he would continue making his case for another four-year term, ignoring the calls from some in his own party to step aside. He said he expected Trump and his allies to attack his record during the convention, but he urged Americans in both parties to step back from a politics of hate and division that leads to violence.

“We debate and disagree,” he said. “We compare and contrast the character of the candidates, the records, the issues, the agenda, the vision for America. But in America, we resolve our differences at the ballot box.”

The shooting, at a Trump campaign rally Saturday evening in Butler County, Pennsylvania, upended what had already become a chaotic presidential contest, with Biden waging a fierce intraparty battle to remain the Democratic nominee because of his poor debate performance last month. For weeks, the president and his campaign have struggled to shift the attention back to the former president.

The assassination attempt did just that, but in the process raised disturbing questions about the deeply rooted anger and divisions in the country. And it underscored the willingness by some to resort to violence instead of the ballot box to resolve those differences.

It also raised serious security issues for those responsible for protecting the nation’s political leaders, including how the Secret Service could have allowed the assailant to get close enough to fire shots that came within inches of killing the former president.

Biden’s campaign has pulled down its political ads and canceled political travel by the president and the vice president that had been scheduled for the beginning of the week, although Biden is still scheduled to be interviewed by Lester Holt of NBC News on Monday.

A Biden campaign official said that the Democratic National Committee and the president’s campaign were expecting to get back to the business of running against Trump by Tuesday, holding political events and drawing what the official called the contrast between the president’s record and Trump’s “backward-looking agenda.”

Earlier Sunday, in afternoon remarks from the Roosevelt Room in the White House, Biden said that he had a “short but good conversation” with Trump on Saturday night after the shooting but did not elaborate. “I’m sincerely grateful that he’s doing well and recovering,” Biden said. “Jill and I are keeping him and his family in our prayers.”

Biden also called on Americans to “unite as one nation,” and vowed that the federal government would conduct a “thorough and swift” investigation into the shooter’s motives and an independent review of security at the rally.

“Unity is the most elusive goal of all. Nothing is more important than that right now,” he said. “Unity. We’ll debate and we’ll disagree. That’s not going to change. But we’re going to not lose sight of the fact of who we are as Americans.”

Biden said Sunday that he had ordered a national security review of what happened at Trump’s rally and promised to share the results with the American people. He also said he had directed the Secret Service to review security arrangements for the Republican convention, and pledged that the agency would give Trump “every resource capability and protective measure necessary to ensure his continued safety.”

Flanked by Vice President Kamala Harris and Attorney General Merrick Garland for his afternoon remarks, Biden offered his “deepest condolences” to the family of a man at Trump’s rally who was killed by the shooter, calling him “a father who was protecting his family from the bullets that were being fired.” He said he was praying for those injured to make a full recovery.

The president provided few details about the investigation into how the shooter carried out the attack, which, in addition to killing a spectator, also critically wounded two others.

“The FBI is leading this investigation, which is still in its early stages,” the president said. “We don’t yet have any information about the motive of the shooter. We know who he is. I urge everyone, everyone: Please don’t make assumptions about his motives or his affiliations. Let the FBI do their job.”

In the meantime, White House aides and campaign officials canceled events Monday but said the president would move ahead with several planned events in the coming days.

A speech planned for Monday at the Lyndon Baines Johnson library in Austin, Texas, was postponed for a week, and a fundraiser in the city will not take place, aides said. Harris postponed a campaign stop planned for Tuesday in Palm Beach County, Florida, where she had planned to address abortion, according to two people with knowledge of her plans.

But Biden’s interview with Holt will take place at the White House, rather than in Austin. And the White House said Biden would keep his campaign events in Las Vegas. Biden will speak at an NAACP conference Tuesday and an UnidosUS conference Wednesday, even as Trump and his party hold the Republican convention in Milwaukee.

In both sets of remarks Sunday, Biden made a plea that — if recent history is any guide — seemed unlikely to be heeded by activists on either side of the nation’s increasingly bitter divide.

“We need to get out of our silos,” he said, “where we only listen to those with whom we agree, where misinformation is rampant, where foreign actors fan the flames of our division, to shape the outcomes consistent with their interests, not ours.”

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