Joe Biden cracks down on attacks on Donald Trump after shooting at rally

Washington:

Donald Trump’s assassination attempt has forced Joe Biden’s campaign to scale back its attacks for now, with the US president admitting he was wrong to say his rival should be “targeted”.

But Biden has more broadly defended his rhetoric depicting his Republican predecessor as a threat to democracy and is signaling he will not hold back for long as he criticizes the man he defeated in 2020.

When Biden urged Americans to “lower the temperature” in a rare Oval Office speech on Sunday after Trump’s shooting, it seemed like it might deprive him of his main line of attack.

Last week, the 81-year-old attempted to return his campaign to his Republican rival after weeks of turmoil in the Democratic Party over his age and health following a disastrous debate performance.

In light of Trump’s attack, Biden told NBC on Monday that it was a “mistake” to say in a call with donors a week ago that it was “time to put Trump on target.”

The Democrat said he meant the party should “focus on what he’s doing” rather than calling on him to resign after the debate.

Republicans took aim at the comment in particular, accusing Biden himself of creating the political conditions that led a shooter to try to kill Trump — ignoring their own candidate’s record of encouraging violence.

But although the Biden campaign softened its language in the immediate aftermath of the shooting, Biden himself hinted that he would not back down.

“How do you talk about the threat to democracy, which is real, when a president says the things he says. You just don’t say anything because it might incite someone?” he told NBC.

“I didn’t engage in that rhetoric. Now my opponent has engaged in that rhetoric, he talks about how there will be a bloodbath when he loses.”

He also criticized Trump for promising to pardon those involved in the January 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol by pro-Trump supporters and for joking about former US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband being attacked with a gavel.

‘Change the calculation’

Facing repeated questions about Biden’s comment at a White House briefing, press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said “it’s OK to speak to someone’s record, to speak to someone’s character.”

Despite canceling a trip to Texas on Monday, Biden is moving ahead with a planned visit to the battleground state of Nevada, creating a split screen with Trump’s convention appearances.

In an op-ed in the Washington Post, political columnist Karen Tumulty wrote that “there could hardly be a worse time for Biden to be forced to redesign his strategy against Trump.”

Trump’s shooting could, however, help Biden as he fights for his own political survival.

“Obviously, this changes the calculus for people calling for Biden to resign,” Peter Loge, a political scientist at George Washington University, told AFP.

“That buys Biden some time.”

The Democratic meltdown over Biden’s age after the debate dominated the airwaves for weeks, but with Saturday’s shooting the outrage over his candidacy abruptly fell silent.

Biden also sought to strike a presidential tone on the shooting, reacting quickly on Saturday and addressing the nation on Sunday in only the third speech of his presidency from the Oval Office.

But if the shooting could unify Democrats, it could also doom Biden’s re-election bid, with the president already trailing in most polls.

Iconic images of a bloodied Trump shaking his fist after the shooting are already galvanizing Republican hopes that voters will further unite behind him for a landslide victory in November.

Loge, however, said there may be little effect since “many voters consider Trump too crazy and Biden too old, and an assassination attempt doesn’t change that.”

He added that focusing on the immediate impact of the shooting on campaigns was the “wrong question” and missed the broader need to confront the threats and violence plaguing U.S. politics.

“If we make political violence part of a campaign strategy, we will lose focus on political violence and end up normalizing it,” he said.

(Except the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)