Washington: For months, the message from the White House and Wilmington was as stark as it was simple: This year’s election amounts to an existential choice between a defender of democracy and a destroyer of democracy. Nothing less than the future of America is at stake.
And then the bullets started flying.
The assassination attempt over the weekend has complicated President Joe Biden’s argument now that former President Donald Trump has gone from being a longtime instigator of political violence to a victim of it. Republicans, including Trump’s newly anointed running mate, Sen. JD Vance of Ohio, instantly blamed Biden, citing his sharp rhetoric.
No one in Biden’s camp thinks that is a good-faith argument, especially from allies of a former president who sent the mob that marauded the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, and did nothing to stop its assault, and has now vowed to pardon rioters convicted of violent crimes. But the images of Trump with blood streaked across his face after being grazed by a would-be assassin’s bullet raise the question of how far language should go in a heated campaign.
Biden, who has long preached unity and civility, conceded on Monday that it was “a mistake” to tell supporters a week ago that he wanted to “put Trump in a bull’s-eye,” an expression that was certainly metaphorical but opened the president to criticism after his opponent found himself in literal cross hairs. At the same time, Biden and his team have made clear that they will not back off efforts to demonstrate that Trump is a budding dictator who is dangerous to the country.
“How do you talk about the threat to democracy, which is real, when a president says things like he says?” Biden asked Lester Holt of NBC News on Monday during his first interview since the assassination attempt. “Do you just not say anything because it may incite somebody? Look, I’m not engaged in that rhetoric. Now, my opponent is engaged in that rhetoric.”
Biden responded to the shooting in Butler, Pennsylvania, on Saturday by calling Trump to express relief that he was not more seriously wounded and urging Americans to “lower the temperature” this campaign season. His campaign suspended television ads and its regular barrage of attack emails.
But that pause ended quickly. Once Trump picked Vance as his vice-presidential nominee on Monday, the Biden campaign returned to its regularly scheduled political messaging.
In a statement, Jen O’Malley Dillon, the campaign chair, declared that Vance “has a reputation as one of the most far-right extremists in Washington” who “echoes Donald Trump’s baseless lies refusing to accept the results of the 2020 election” and “has repeatedly attempted to whitewash the political violence that occurred on Jan. 6.”
That may sound harsh, but Democratic strategists maintained that it was well within the bounds of political rhetoric and that lowering the temperature did not mean freezing the campaign. Democrats, they said, have to be able to discuss the stakes of the election in terms that will make them clear to voters.
“The shocking events on Saturday don’t change Trump’s record of using violent rhetoric at his speeches, including riling up the crowd on Jan. 6,” said Margie Omero, a Democratic strategist. “Dozens of his own former senior advisers and Cabinet secretaries don’t even think he’s fit to serve. The stakes remain as high as ever, and we should continue to communicate it.”
Sen. Chris Coons, D-Del., a close ally of the president, noted that Biden jumped into the 2020 race in part out of outrage at Trump’s equivocal response to a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, that turned violent. “I disagree that the only thing that has accelerated the temperature of our political discourse is Democrats suggesting that Donald Trump and his actions and Project 2025 pose a real threat to democracy,” he said.
At the same time, Coons said some soul-searching after Butler was in order. “Speaking for myself, I will be more cautious and measured and thoughtful in how I describe Republicans and how I campaign because I want to contribute to the change in temperature that President Biden has called for,” he said.
The argument by some of Trump’s allies is not that Biden directly calls for violence — although they have not forgotten the time in 2018 when Biden said, “If we were in high school, I’d take him behind the gym and beat the hell out of him” because of his treatment of women. But they maintain that Biden and his allies have fueled a climate of hatred toward the former president by calling him “an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs,” as Vance put it on Saturday.
While Biden has not gone as far as some Democrats, Republicans complain that his liberal supporters regularly refer to Trump as a fascist, a Nazi, a modern-day Adolf Hitler. Of course, so have some Republicans — including Vance, who before he became a convert warned that Trump could become “America’s Hitler.”
“Comparing Trump to the Soviet Union and to Hitler isn’t helpful,” Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., told LEX18 in Lexington on Monday. “And it’s instigating people to think, ‘Oh my goodness, if President Trump wins, democracy will end.’ When you say such hyperbolic things, I think crazy people somehow can be incited by it. So I hope President Biden will tone down his rhetoric.”
Trump, of course, has trafficked in provocative language for years and far more explicitly and prolifically than Biden. He has encouraged violence against protesters, reporters, looters, shoplifters and immigrants. He warned that “you’d have riots” if he were denied the nomination in 2016 and a “blood bath for the country” if he lost this year. He has said he would like to be a dictator just for a day and favored “termination” of the Constitution to return himself to power without another election.
A few months ago, Trump posted a video with an image of Biden with his hands and feet tied together. Trump has repeatedly shared videos depicting him hitting the president with golf balls and once posted a photo of him holding a baseball bat next to the Manhattan district attorney prosecuting him.
Some Republicans who have been supporting Biden have advised the campaign not to pivot away from its message on democracy, noting that Trump will not cool his own rhetoric for long. “Trump can’t help himself — a leopard doesn’t change his spots — and his professed love of dictators doesn’t disappear,” said former Rep. Denver Riggleman, R-Va. “So I don’t think the assassination attempt affects Biden’s strategy at all as far as messaging.”
Biden left the White House on Monday for Las Vegas and the first stop of a three-day campaign swing as the Republican National Convention opened. Karine Jean-Pierre, the White House press secretary, said Biden planned no changes in his own rhetoric in coming days. “Nothing different than what he’s done in the last almost four years,” she said, adding, “It is OK to speak to someone’s record and someone’s character.”
Whit Ayres, a Republican strategist, said it would depend on how Biden framed the argument. “If he sticks to specific things Trump has said, like terminating the Constitution, then he can continue to make the case that Trump is a threat to democracy,” Ayres said.
But that will not solve the larger problem for Biden created by the shooting, he added. “After the assassination attempt, Trump’s image as ‘strong’ and Biden’s as ‘weak’ take on sharper relief,” Ayres said. “If the Democrats stick with Biden, they are effectively conceding the presidency to Trump.”
Matt Bennett, a co-founder of Third Way, a centrist Democratic advocacy group, said it was “grotesque” to blame Democratic rhetoric for the shooting. But while describing Trump as a threat to democracy is appropriate, he added, “it may not be effective.” Base Democrats already believe that and undecided voters appear unmoved by the argument.
“What they need to hear is a vision of a calmer, more hopeful future,” Bennett said. “Trump is incapable of delivering that, while Biden is well suited to it. So, the assassination attempt could reset the race, but perhaps not as the immediate commentary suggested.”