For two weeks, riot involved the Democratic Party. Suddenly, everything is still.
Numerous Democrats said Saturday that assassination attempt on the former president donald trumpThe Pennsylvania rally would put an end to any efforts to replace the president Joe Biden. At least for a while.
“I think it’s over,” said a Biden ally. “You just lose all momentum.”
Before shots rang out at the event — injuring Trump, killing one attendee and injuring another — Biden was on a damage control trip after a disastrous presidential debate on June 27. as the presumptive Democratic nominee, he held meetings with groups of House Democrats on Saturday aimed at calming concerns. Instead, left many elected officials impressed.
“They were having a really bad political day and then we had this supernova event. Now it’s frozen,” said a longtime Democratic strategist involved in several presidential campaigns. “If you’re an advocate of, ‘How can we tell the old man it’s time to go?’ – it is very difficult to have this conversation publicly. This event blocks the sun now.”
Rather than wait for the possibility of more calls from Congress to step aside, Biden took the stage as president, addressing the nation in a live televised speech in which he condemned the violence.
“There is no place in America for this type of violence; he’s sick, he’s sick,” Biden said. And then, returning to one of the fundamental themes that date back to when he first ran for office in 2019, he said, “It’s one of the reasons we have to bring this country together.”
After the violence at Trump’s rally, Biden’s operation put the brakes on politics. In the hours following the incident, the Biden campaign halted “external communications” and tried to quickly pull television ads, a campaign official said. The Democratic National Committee also paused television ads and billboards attacking Trump.
The Biden campaign also told staffers to “refrain from making any comments on social media or in public” and “pause any proactive campaign communications on all platforms and in all circumstances until we know more,” according to a email obtained by NBC News.
The email said that police in Wilmington, Delaware, had increased their security presence outside the campaign headquarters “for the immediate future” and that starting at 6 a.m. Sunday, private security guards will be stationed “ on each floor.”
Another Biden ally said it would reflect badly on anyone in the Democratic Party who tried to call for a sitting president to resign while he was in the middle of a crisis.
“The effort to dislodge Biden is likely over. He will not voluntarily step aside at this time,” said the second ally. “Biden has demonstrated that he will fight.”
Everything happened against the backdrop of a growing chorus of legislators who asked Biden to drop his pursuit of the nomination. This was in addition to dozens of donors who I turned off the tap after a debate in which Biden faltered repeatedly, sometimes struggling even to finish his sentences. Last week, even those who were part of Biden’s re-election efforts expressed doubt that Biden had a path.
All along, critics were out of time if they tried to oust Biden from his position. The Democratic National Convention is scheduled for mid-August, and a virtual vote on the nomination is expected to take place weeks before.
In the short term, Democrats were, late Saturday, trying to push back on another issue, while Republicans were trying to shift blame for the violence against Trump to the rhetoric they promoted. In social media posts, some Republicans criticized Biden for using the term “targeting Trump” at a campaign event.
“Look, there are about 40 days until the convention, 120 days until the election and we can’t waste any more time distracting ourselves. I have one job: beat Donald Trump. … I am absolutely certain that I am the best person to do this,” Biden said Monday in a private call with donors. “So we finished talking about the debate. It’s time to put Trump on the spot. He hasn’t done anything in the last 10 days except ride around in his golf cart, bragging about the scores he didn’t score.”
Republicans are bringing the charge after Democrats have for years criticized Republicans, and Trump in particular, for stoking anger, division and even violence during the Jan. 6, 2001, attack on the Capitol. On January 6, supporters shouted threats to hang Trump’s vice president, Mike Pence. Later, Trump called they “patriots”.
Biden launched his campaign for the first time after riots in Charlottesville, Virginia, where white supremacists and neo-Nazis took to the streets carrying torches and reciting hateful speech. Trump was widely criticized for comments that appeared to minimize the numbers of the far right. At the time, Biden said he wanted to bring back the “soul of America” and unite a hyper-divided country.
“You also had some very good people on both sides,” Trump said after Charlottesville. “There were people in that group who were there to protest the taking down, for them, of a very, very important statue and the renaming of a Robert E. Lee park to another name. You had people – and I’m not talking about the neo-Nazis and the white nationalists; they should be completely condemned – there were many people in this group besides neo-Nazis and white nationalists.”
This article was originally published in NBCNews. with
