President Biden addressed the nation from the Oval Office in the wake of an assassination attempt on his predecessor and political rival, former President Trump, urging Americans to “unite” and collectively “lower the temperature in our politics.”
It was a speech about fundamentals. “Disagreement,” the president said, was “inevitable,” not just to American democracy but to “human nature itself.” The task before the country, Biden continued, was to disagree vigorously without allowing that disagreement to turn the political arena into “a literal battlefield or God forbid, a killing field.”
“We stand for an America, not of extremism and fury, but of decency and grace,” the president said, adding that, ahead of the coming election, the country faces “a time of testing as the election approaches and the higher the stakes, the more fervent the passions become. This places an added burden on each of us to ensure that no matter how strong our convictions, we must never descend into violence.”
The admonishment did not lead to introspection about the rhetoric from the White House or his campaign, a gripe that Republicans were quick to voice. “The sentiments expressed by the president in his remarks just now are very noble,” former Attorney General Bill Barr said in an interview with Fox News, “and I hope they follow them, because if they believe it, they will scale back the rhetoric.”
Brinksmanship has been a constant in the 2024 election with the campaigns of Biden and Trump both accusing the other of seeding the destruction of the Republic, whipping up the passions of their voters with regular warnings that democracy itself is in danger after November.
“A vote for Trump is a vote to save Wisconsin and is a vote to save your country. This country is finished if we don’t win this election,” the former president said at an April rally earlier this year, riffing on a theme fundamental to his opponent. Preservation of democracy has been the stated mission of Biden since his return to politics in 2020, and Trump his existential enemy.
Before an Independence Hall lit bright by blood-red light in September of 2022, Biden warned that the extremism of his predecessor threatened the health of the Republic, attempting to draw out “extreme MAGA ideology” from the “soul of this nation” like poison is drawn from a wound. Not all Republicans subscribe to that extremism, he said during those remarks, but “there’s no question the Republican Party today is dominated, driven and intimidated by Trump and MAGA Republicans.”
“Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans represent an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our Republic,” the president proclaimed – and has not stopped proclaiming since.
Biden told a crowd in North Carolina after the Atlanta debate that “Trump is a genuine threat to this nation.” At a Wisconsin rally the next week, he doubled down, saying that Trump "really could become a dictator,” arguing “we cannot let Trump win. No, I mean, that’s not hyperbole. We can’t. This is the most dangerous election in American history.”
Trump seemed to be joking during a December interview with Fox News, saying he wouldn’t be a dictator “except for day one.” Liberals were not laughing.
No, the MAGA ideology, as Democrats like Biden see it, instead represents a very real curtailment of fundamental rights from abortion to election access. The restrictive immigration plans of Trump are a real cruelty, in their eyes, and his plans to gut and remake the federal bureaucracy, extreme. It was this view that inspired Biden to earnestly call MAGA in August of 2022 “semi-fascism.”
Ohio Sen. JD Vance drew a direct line from that rhetoric to the rifle barrel of the foiled assassin who fired on Trump in Pennsylvania Saturday. “Today is not just some isolated incident. The central premise of the Biden campaign is that President Donald Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs,” the Republican, who is at the top of Trump’s VP list, tweeted. “That rhetoric led directly to President Trump's attempted assassination.”
The motivation of Thomas Matthew Crooks, the suspected gunman who was killed by Secret Service and who previously registered as a Republican but reportedly made political donations to at least one liberal group, is still unknown. Investigations into his profile are ongoing by law enforcement, a fact the president stressed at the White House Sunday night.
“The bottom line I think is that when someone is demonized to the extent Trump was being demonized, you are putting a target on them,” Barr said after Biden’s remarks wrapped, “and you are increasing the risk they are going to become a target for someone who has a mixture of these factors – imbalance, some potential political element to it.”
At least one Democrat, Maine Rep. Jared Golden, agreed not only that temperatures ought to be cooled, a message shared by Biden, but also that painting political opponents as existential threats, a strategy employed by Biden, should be abandoned.
“This is the moment for elected officials and candidates for political office to lead us down a better road toward the hopeful future that Americans want and deserve,” Golden wrote in a long X thread Sunday. “This is the moment for elected officials and candidates for political office to lead us down a better road toward the hopeful future that Americans want and deserve.”
The White House did not return RCP’s request for comment when asked about the bipartisan admonishment from Golden. A Biden campaign official said that the president’s broadside about democracy would continue as it is his “north star” and the “backbone of his campaign.”
“Stopping political violence was a central motivation for President Biden’s decision to run in 2020 and why he’s running again in 2024,” the official said.
“He has been clear and forceful that in America, we never settle our differences through violence – we settle them at the ballot box,” the official concluded.
From the Oval Office, Biden returned to that theme.
“Violence has never been the answer, whether it’s with members of Congress in both parties being targeted and shot or a violent mob attacking the Capitol on January 6th or a brutal attack on the spouse of former Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, or information and intimidation on election officials or the kidnapping plot against the sitting governor or an attempted assassination on Donald Trump,” he said.
Biden did not, however, argue again in that moment that Trump was a threat.
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