WASHINGTON — US President Joe Biden's reelection campaign quickly upended its strategy after an assassination attempt on Republican rival Donald Trump in western Pennsylvania, calling off verbal attacks on the former president to focus instead on a message of unity.
Within hours of Saturday's shooting, Biden's campaign was pulling down television ads and suspending other political communications, including those that had highlighted Trump's May felony conviction in New York state court relating to hush money paid to a porn star to avert a sex scandal before the 2016 US election.
"We must unite as one nation," Biden said in White House remarks on Sunday, adding he would have an Oval Office address in the evening. Biden condemned political violence again, as he did on Saturday night, and asked Americans to "let the FBI do their job."
A Biden campaign official said Biden, in his speech at 8 pm EDT on Sunday (midnight GMT on Monday), will stress a message of unity while pointing out his belief that Trump's agenda is bad for the country. He will conduct an interview with NBC News on Monday.
Afterward, the Democratic National Committee and the campaign "will continue drawing the contrast between our positive vision for the future and Trump and Republicans' backwards-looking agenda over the course of the week," the official said.
DNC Chair Jaime Harrison called Republican National Committee Chair Michael Whatley to offer help and try to bring down the political temperature, another campaign official said.
Some Republicans have blamed Biden, without evidence, for inspiring the shooting by criticising Trump. The 20-year-old shooter was a registered Republican whose motive is unknown.
Biden's advisers had hoped to tamp down recent calls from some of his fellow Democrats and others that he step aside and let another candidate represent the party in the Nov. 5 election, sharpening his focus on the dangers he has said Trump presents to US democratic norms and reproductive rights as well as Trump's false statements about winning the 2020 election.
"This changes everything," one campaign official said of the assassination attempt. "We're still assessing. Making the case against Trump, drawing that split screen, will get much harder."
"The president is trying to lower the temperature," the official added.
The Biden campaign officials said they expect that the assassination attempt will lower the pressure from congressional Democrats for Biden, 81, to step aside in the race amid concerns about his fitness for office.
Some Democrats in the House of Representatives and Senate have publicly called upon Biden to drop out in the aftermath of his shaky performance in a June debate against Trump.
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"It's over," one White House source told Reuters about the attempt to push Biden out of the 2024 race. That may be overly optimistic, other Democratic sources said. The current wave of calls is over but is expected to resume once Biden inevitably stumbles again, they said.
Biden's planned trip on Monday to the Lyndon B. Johnson presidential library in Austin, Texas — where he was expected to speak on the landmark Civil Rights Act that Johnson signed into law in the 1960s and criticise Trump's attacks on immigrants and American diversity — has been postponed, the White House said.
Biden's plan to deliver a keynote speech at the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) convention in Las Vegas on Tuesday on his administration's commitment to racial justice and equity for all Americans is unchanged.
Because the shooting happened in the election battleground state of Pennsylvania, which Biden won over Trump in 2020 by a narrow margin, the incident could be especially impactful, according to some political strategists, by increasing Republican turnout by voters sympathetic to Trump.
"This doesn't guarantee that Trump flips Pennsylvania," Republican pollster Frank Luntz wrote on social media. "But the long and winding road for Joe Biden just became even longer and windier. Just as what happened to George Floyd had a lasting impact on tens of millions of Americans, the shooting of Donald Trump will be significantly consequential in a way the shooter never intended."
Floyd is the Black man who was killed by a white police officer in Minneapolis in 2020, a murder that prompted protests in many US cities and abroad.
Other Democratic candidates running this year are also rethinking their plans to focus on the dangers they have said Trump poses if elected.
"The real question is whether in two weeks we can go back and declare Trump a threat to the country. That was our playbook, and it's fair, but unclear how much of our spurs were taken off," said a Democrat involved in a Senate campaign, speaking on condition of anonymity.
Trump, 78, is due to receive his party's official nomination for president during the four-day Republican National Convention in Milwaukee beginning on Monday.
