The failed assassination attempt on Donald Trump has thrown the Democrats’ presidential campaign into suspension, as they suspended attack ads, refrained from criticism of Trump – and may have halted the drive to depose Joe Biden as the party’s candidate.
A campaign that was already in disarray amid uncertainty over the US president’s fate, prompted by last month’s debate fiasco, was plunged into further confusion after the shooting. Having been set on relentlessly attacking the presumptive Republican nominee, Democrats drastically changed tack, stressing the need for national unity.
They suspended a $50m advertising blitz and quickly pulled television attack ads, in moves consistent with Biden’s plea in a Sunday night speech from the White House to “lower the temperature in our politics”.
The Biden re-election campaign also told staff members to “refrain from issuing any comments on social media or in public” and to “pause any proactive campaign communication across all platforms and in all circumstances until we know more”, NBC reported.
The changed mood seemed to offer Biden the chance to reset and to consolidate his shaky position as the Democrats’ nominee. He has asserted an above-the-fray role, in a series of authoritative statements calling for calm. At the same time, the shock of Saturday’s events seem to have at least temporarily halted the fevered speculation about the president’s candidacy, with no further elected figures publicly calling for him to step aside since.
Biden cancelled a planned speech on Monday at the Lyndon Johnson library in Austin to mark the 60th anniversary of the Civil Rights Act, while Kamala Harris followed suit by postponing a Tuesday stop in Palm Beach, Florida, where she had been expected to talk about abortion.
Rather than attacking Trump in the coming days, the campaign told journalists that it would focus on Biden’s track record of condemning political violence of all kinds. A scheduled Monday prime-time interview with NBC’s Lester Holt, originally scheduled as part of the Austin visit, will go ahead but will now take place in the White House.
Though the pause in the campaign against Trump was expected to be brief, the pause in some Democrats’ campaign against Biden himself could be of greater longer-term significance. Some said the shooting may have served to strengthen Biden’s position – at least within his own party – after the 27 June debate had threatened to fatally undermine it.
After days of desperately fending off pleas that he end his campaign to avoid the possibility of a disastrous election defeat in November, Biden was able to reassert himself: first on Saturday night, when he set aside his customary enmity to Trump by telephoning and referring to him publicly as “Donald”, and then with Sunday’s address, given from behind the Resolute desk, that was notably presidential in tone.
“We cannot, we must not, go down this road in America,” Biden said in only his third public speech from the Oval Office.
“There is no place in America for this kind of violence, for any violence, ever. Period. No exceptions. We can’t allow this violence to be normalised,” Biden said.
“The power to change America should always rest in the hands of the people, not in the hands of a would-be assassin.”
The transformed circumstances prompted some Biden supporters to predict that the bid to unseat the 81-year-old president as the party’s nominee was over.
“It’s likely the effort to dislodge Biden has ended. He’s not going to voluntarily step aside in this moment,” an unnamed ally of the president told NBC.
“I think it’s over. You just lose all momentum,” another said.
Biden has stoutly resisted efforts to persuade him to stand aside following the Atlanta debate, in which he repeatedly appeared confused and sometimes unable to complete coherent arguments or even sentences, while failing to counter Trump’s stream of lies and invective.
He has since mounted a counterattack, arguing the value of his half-century of political experience to party caucuses, and staging a press conference at last week’s Nato summit that was generally viewed a relative success.
Some party strategists insisted that Saturday’s seismic events – and Biden’s response – bolstered that case.
“It helps Biden’s argument,” one party insider told The Hill. “He represents stability. He’s managing a crisis. And in a way he’s answering the argument about his mental acuity.
“And that creates a contrast with Trump. You can’t count on Trump to be stable for so long. And when Trump starts Trumping, it’s game on.”
Another told NBC: “If you’re an advocate for: ‘How do we tell the old man it’s time to go?’ – it’s really hard to have that conversation publicly. This event blocks out the sun right now.”
Not everyone was convinced. The Hill quoted another Democratic strategist as saying that Saturday’s shooting would “slow the public noise but I don’t think it slows the private conversations”.
“I’ve seen enough data to show my guy trailing. And the state-by-state numbers are really rough,” he said.
