President Joe Biden made an earnest plea for Americans to tone down the political rhetoric and pull together as a nation in the aftermath of Saturday’s shocking assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump, Biden’s Republican presidential rival in November.
“Political rhetoric has gotten very heated,” Biden said in a rare Oval Office address that aired live across multiple networks at 8 p.m. ET. “It’s time to cool it down.”
“Politics must never be a literal battlefield — or god forbid, a killing field,” Biden said.
Biden expressed his concern for Trump, who was hit on the ear by a bullet while holding a rally in Butler, Penn., as well as the Pennsylvania man who was caught in the crossfire with the Secret Service and another man wounded at the Saturday rally. The deadly political violence is yet another shocking development in a presidential race between Biden and Trump that has been without precedent.
“We must stand together,” Biden said during his six-minute address. The president urged his audience to remember that despite political differences, “we are not enemies, we’re neighbors, we’re friends, co-workers, citizens, most importantly, we’re fellow Americans. We must stand together. Yesterday’s shooting calls on all of us to take a step back, take stock of where we are and how we go forward from here.”
Biden referenced the rising tide of political violence that has swept across the country in recent years, including the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol and the 2022 attack on Paul Pelosi, husband of former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. He also cited shooting incidents involving members of Congress and now the attack on Trump at an outdoor rally. He also cited a kidnapping plot against a sitting governor — presumbably a reference to Michigan’s Gretchen Whitmer — and the rising incidents of doxxing and other forms of intimidation against elected officials and public servants. “There is no place in America fo this kind of violence, ever,” he said.
Biden acknowledged that disagreements in such a large country are inevitable but Americans need to lean on our democratic traditions of settling disputes “at the ballot box,” Biden said more than once.
Democratics and the Biden campaign has faced criticism in the wake of the shooting for what some see as overheated strategies to paint Trump as a social menace.
The stakes in this election are enormously high,” Biden said. “This election is going to shape the future America and the world for decades to come. I believe that all my soul.
“The higher the stakes, the more fervent the passions become,” he said. “This places an added burden on each of this that no matter how strong our conviction, we must never descend into violence.”
