President Biden and his party face a new challenge in the wake of the attempted assassination of former President Trump on Saturday — how to calibrate their message.
Up till now, Biden and his team have cast Trump as an existential danger to democracy.
The hope, clearly, is that this argument will be enough for Biden to wring out a victory in November despite low approval ratings, a dismal first debate performance and broader voter anxiety about his age.
But the question is how to modulate this message so as not to seem crass — or to draw a backlash — in the wake of the shooting at the Trump rally in Butler, Pa., that killed one attendee and injured two others. The attack appears to have come within inches of killing Trump himself.
In an Oval Office address to the nation on Sunday night, Biden began trying to thread the needle.
The president framed his message as being about “the need for us to lower the temperature in our politics and to remember, while we may disagree, we are not enemies.”
Biden also noted the expected criticisms of him at the Republican National Convention, which began in Milwaukee on Monday. He added that he would “continue to speak out strongly for our democracy, stand up for our Constitution and the rule of law, to call for action at the ballot box, no violence on our streets.”
To be sure, Democrats are in a vexing position. They, and their voters, see Trump as by far the most dangerous proponent of an incendiary rhetoric that has infused American politics with new toxicity.
The former president has used hyperbolically aggressive rhetoric about Biden and the Democrats innumerable times, including contending his opponent is “the destroyer of American democracy.”
He has said that “Marxist lunatics and perverts ... have infested our educational system.” He has verbally attacked judges overseeing cases against him, their ethnic backgrounds and their family members. And he has repeatedly cast the news media as “enemies of the people.”
Yet he is seen, at least by his supporters, as a victim rather than a driver of the nation’s ferocious polarization.
On Monday, Trump announced Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio) as his running mate. Two days previously, in the immediate aftermath of the Butler shooting, Vance had sought to pin the blame for what happened on Biden.
“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,” Vance wrote on social media. “That rhetoric led directly to President Trump’s attempted assassination.”
Biden has made some concessions to the delicate atmosphere of the moment.
An intended Monday campaign swing to Texas — where the president was to mark the anniversary of the Civil Rights Act — was postponed. The Biden campaign also sought to get its TV ads taken down in the immediate aftermath of the Trump assassination attempt.
Even more strikingly, in an NBC News interview with “Nightly News” anchor Lester Holt, recorded at the White House on Monday afternoon, Biden conceded it was a “mistake” to say recently that it was “time to put Trump in the bull's-eye.”
The softening of the campaign rhetoric may be short-lived. In the NBC News interview, Biden pivoted from his acknowledgment of having erred with the “bull's-eye” remark to say it was nonetheless necessary to put a “focus on Trump’s agenda.”
“I’m not the guy that said I want to be a dictator on Day One. I’m not the guy that refused to accept the outcome of the election,” Biden added.
On Tuesday and Wednesday, Biden will be in Las Vegas, where he will address an NAACP convention and a UnidosUS meeting, and hold a separate campaign event.
Some influential liberal figures argue it is important to keep taking the verbal fight to Trump — and that this can be done despite Saturday’s events.
In a posting to X on Monday, former Obama speechwriter-turned-podcaster Jon Favreau argued that Democrats should not be “in knots over what to say right now.”
Favreau contended there was a “pretty straightforward” possible message that could clearly illuminate Trump’s past words and actions.
Such a message, the former speechwriter wrote, could include an affirmation that “we should oppose political violence in all its forms, whoever it comes from, whoever it targets.”
But it could also incorporate the imperative to “oppose leaders who say that their supporters who’ve been convicted of committing political violence should be pardoned.” That’s an unmistakable jab at Trump, who has referred to people jailed for Jan.6-related offenses as “hostages.”
Grant Reeher, a professor of political science at Syracuse University’s Maxwell School, argued that, for now, Team Biden has to be “more careful” how they articulate the case against Trump.
But he suggested that, in time, the former president was almost certain to open the door for more frontal verbal jabs.
“If he goes after Biden in the same way he has gone after Biden in the past, it would be almost silly for Biden to play nice,” Reeher said.
The Memo is a reported column by Niall Stanage.
