President Biden called on Americans to take a step back and “lower the temperature in our politics” during a rare address from the Oval Office on Sunday, one day after former president Donald Trump survived an assassination attempt at a rally in Pennsylvania.
“A former president was shot,” Biden said during a six-minute address to the nation on Sunday evening. “An American citizen killed. While simply exercising his freedom to support the candidate of his choosing. We cannot, we must not go down this road in America.”
Trump was shot in the ear and quickly took cover after the bullet grazed him. When Secret Service personnel helped him up, he reappeared with blood smeared across his face and offered a fist-pump to the crowd in a sign of resilience.
Biden went on to offer condolences to the family of former fire chief Corey Comperatore, 50, a victim of the shooting who died protecting his family from bullets. At least two other attendees were critically injured in the shooting.
“Violence has never been the answer, whether it’s members of Congress of both parties being targeted and shot or a violent mob attacking the Capitol on January 6, or a brutal attack on the spouse of former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi or information intimidation on election officials with a kidnapping plot against the city government or an attempted assassination on Donald Trump,” Biden said Sunday. “There is not place in America for this kind of violence or any violence ever. Period.”
However, Biden and his fellow Democrats have so far failed to take accountability for their own heated political rhetoric, which has frequently targeted Trump.
Just last month, Biden posted on X calling Trump a “genuine threat to this nation.”
“He’s a threat to our freedom,” the post added. “He’s a threat to our democracy. He’s literally a threat to everything America stands for.”
In a separate post less than two weeks ago, Biden warned that Trump “really could become the dictator that he promised to be on day one,” after the Supreme Court ruled that the former president is immune to criminal prosecution for official acts taken while in office, but affirmed that he can be prosecuted for unofficial acts.
Representative Dan Goldman (D., N.Y.), meanwhile, previously said Trump “is not only unfit, he is destructive to our democracy and he has to be eliminated.”
In March, when the Biden-Harris campaign posted on X that Trump said he had been treated worse than Abraham Lincoln, who was assassinated, liberal commentator Keith Olbermann replied, “There’s always the hope.”
Democrats have used similarly violent rhetoric against conservative Supreme Court justices.
During a March 2020 pro-abortion rally, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.) said, “I want to tell you, (Justice Neil) Gorsuch. I want to tell you, Kavanaugh. You have released the whirlwind, and you will pay the price. You won’t know what hit you if you go forward with these awful decisions.”
The motive of 20-year-old shooter Thomas Matthew Crooks remains unclear and is still being investigated by law enforcement, Biden said Sunday evening.
The shooter, who was killed by a Secret Service sniper during the shooting, once donated to the Progressive Turnout Project, a left-wing voter turnout group that described the former president as a “threat to our democracy” just hours before the shooting.
Crooks, a registered Republican, donated $15 to the far-left group on January 20, 2021 — the day of President Joe Biden’s inauguration.
“While we vehemently disagree with Donald Trump, we believe our differences must be settled with ballots—not bullets,” a spokesperson for the Progressive Turnout Project said in an email to National Review. “We unequivocally condemn political violence in all of its forms, and we denounce anyone who chooses violence over peaceful political action.”