Joe Biden on Sunday forcefully condemned political violence and appealed to a nation still reeling from the attempted assassination of Donald Trump to reject “extremism and fury”.
In a primetime address from the Oval Office, Biden said Americans must strive for national unity, warning that the political rhetoric in the US had become “too heated” as passions rise in the final months before the November presidential election.
“There is no place in America for this kind of violence – for any violence. Ever. Period. No exception,” the president said in the six-minute speech. “We can’t allow this violence to be normalized.”
Biden’s plea for Americans to “cool it down” came as Trump said that he would use his speech at the Republican national convention to bring “the whole country, even the whole world, together”.
“The speech will be a lot different than it would’ve been two days ago,” Trump said in an interview with the Washington Examiner, adding that the reality of what had happened was “just setting in”.
Biden had ordered an independent review into how a gunman was able to get on to a roof overlooking a Trump campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania on Saturday, and fire multiple shots at the former president from an “elevated position” outside of the venue. The FBI warned on Sunday that online threats of political violence, already heightened, had spiked since the shooting.
The attack, which is being investigated as an attempted assassination and a potential act of domestic terrorism, left Trump with a bloodied ear, killed one spectator, identified as a former fire chief, and critically injured two others.
“We cannot, we must not go down this road in America,” Biden added, citing a rising tide of political violence that included the assault on the US Capitol, the attack on the husband of the former House speaker Nancy Pelosi, the intimidation of election workers, and a kidnapping plot against Gretchen Whitmer, the governor of Michigan.
In Biden’s Oval Office address, only the third of his presidency, he praised Corey Comperatore, the 50-year-old former fire chief who was killed as he dove to shield his wife and daughter. Comperatore, Biden said, was a “hero” and extended his “deepest condolences” to his family.
Investigators were still searching for the motive of the 20-year-old suspect, identified as Thomas Matthew Crooks, of Bethel Park, Pennsylvania.
More than 24 hours after the attack, the investigation into how Crooks managed to open fire, reportedly using a AR-15 bought legally by his father, at the rally remained fluid. Investigators have seized several of Crooks’s devices and are starting to piece together his communications before the event. Authorities said they had discovered potential explosive devices in Crooks’s car.
Meanwhile, details have begun to emerge about the suspect, who was shot and killed by Secret Service counter-snipers.
Crooks’s political leanings remain unclear. Federal campaign finance reports show he donated $15 to a political action committee aligned with the Democratic party, on the day Biden was sworn into office, but eight months later he registered to vote as a member of the Republican party in Pennsylvania.
Former classmates described the would-be assassin as a smart, and quiet student. One former classmate told Reuters that Crooks had not shown a particular interest in politics in high school, and would rather would discuss computers and games.
“He was super smart. That’s what really kind of threw me off was, this was, like, a really, really smart kid, like he excelled,” the classmate told Reuters. “Nothing crazy ever came up in any conversation.”
Another young man who described himself as a former classmate of Crooks at Bethel Park high school spoke with reporters on Sunday, recalling how his ex-companion “was bullied almost every day” on campus.
The president, who was at church in Delaware during the time of the shooting, cut short his weekend and returned to Washington DC to confront the situation, arriving at the White House after midnight. He and Trump spoke late on Saturday.
Biden spoke briefly from the White House earlier on Sunday, delivering a similar message from the Roosevelt Room after receiving a briefing on the investigation in the Situation Room.
In those comments, Biden asked the public not to “make assumptions” about the shooter’s motives or affiliations, as conspiracy theories and misinformation swirl online.
The Republican national convention will begin on Monday in Milwaukee, where Trump is expected to receive a hero’s welcome by the party’s rank and file, rattled but defiant. Trump, who arrived in Milwaukee on Sunday evening, is not scheduled to address the convention until Thursday evening, after he is formally nominated as the party’s nominee.
Speaking to the New York Post while en route to Milwaukee, Trump said he was “supposed to be dead”, adding: “The doctor at the hospital said he never saw anything like this, he called it a miracle.”
Biden’s remarks came at a fragile moment in the election, a re-match between the president and Trump already defined by exceptional tumult and deep political polarization.
For weeks, the president has been fighting calls from elected officials in his own party to abandon his re-election campaign after a disastrous debate performance last month that underscored concerns about his age and fitness for office. The 81-year-old Biden has insisted he will not be pushed out as the party’s nominee, but has done little to quell the swirl of doubt that he is the best candidate to defeat Trump in November. Saturday’s attack has frozen the debate, for now, while Biden embraces the role of healer at a time of national crisis.
Trump earlier this year became the first former president to be convicted of a felony, and faces several more legal challenges related to his role in the January 6 Capitol attack and efforts to overturn the results of a lost election. At least one Republican senator, Mike Lee of Utah, has called for the criminal cases against Trump to be dropped in light of the assassination attempt.
In his remarks on Sunday evening, Biden was realistic about the challenge of heeding his words, accepting that national unity was “the most elusive of goals” in an America deeply divided into camps. Already, Republicans were blaming the violence on the president, arguing that Biden’s attempts to portray Trump as a threat to American democracy helped fuel a toxic political environment.
Yet the attack has drawn condemnation from Republican and Democratic officials across the country as well as world leaders.
“We need to turn the temperature down,” the House speaker, Mike Johnson, said on Sunday, in an interview on CNN.
The president acknowledged that he and Trump offered drastically competing visions, and that their supporters diverged sharply. In Milwaukee, Republicans would offer sustained critiques of Biden’s record, the president said, while he planned to travel on Monday to Nevada, where he would rally supporters around his agenda. Because of the attack, he postponed a trip to Texas, where he was scheduled to speak at the 60th anniversary of the Civil Rights Act at the Lyndon B Johnson presidential library.
“We debate and disagree. We compare and contrast the character of the candidates, the records, the issues, the agenda, the vision for America,” he said, arguing that the contest should be settled at the “ballot box” and “not with bullets”.
After the attack on Saturday night, the Biden campaign reportedly moved to pull down its television ads “as quickly as possible” and pause all “outbound communications”.
“Politics must never be a literal battlefield or, God forbid, a literal killing field,” Biden emphasized in his address on Sunday night. He urged Americans to “get out of our silos” and echo chambers where misinformation is rampant.
“Remember: though we may disagree,” he said, “we are not enemies.”
