Biden campaign whipsaws messaging after Trump assassination attempt and RNC

Monday forced President Joe Biden‘s campaign and supporters to strike a balance between lowering the nation’s political temperature following the assassination attempt against former President Donald Trump and launching renewed attacks against Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH), Trump’s running mate.

Biden made the easy call over the weekend to immediately pause all ad reservations and outbound campaign communications following the Trump assassination attempt and urged voters in a nationally televised address to “lower the temperature” surrounding the election.

However, Vance’s selection appeared to mark the end of campaign officials’ brief silence on the airwaves.

Biden campaign Chairwoman Jen O’Malley Dillon in a Monday statement claimed that the reason Trump settled on Vance was “because Vance will do what Mike Pence wouldn’t on January 6: bend over backwards to enable Trump and his extreme MAGA agenda, even if it means breaking the law and no matter the harm to the American people.”

Later Monday afternoon, O’Malley Dillon, campaign spokesman T.J. Ducklo, and top Biden surrogate Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) additionally attempted to tie Vance and Trump to Republican efforts to further curtail abortion nationwide.

The campaign also lifted its temporary pause on fundraising, sending multiple solicitations to supporters through emails and a tweet from the president’s account all pegged to Vance’s selection as Trump’s running mate.

Bidenworld allies had previously voiced concerns about the president’s campaign options moving forward and questioned how long Biden can afford to sit on the sidelines given questions about his fitness for office.

The Biden campaign declined to comment on this story beyond confirming that the president’s pause on paid advertising still stands.

Multiple Democratic operatives, however, told the Washington Examiner that Biden campaign officials and White House staff were caught off guard by the Saturday attempt on Trump’s life.

Democrats had developed a “robust” slate of counterprograming to run alongside the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee this week, according to people familiar with the planning of those efforts.

The Trump assassination attempt, and Biden’s decision to halt outgoing campaign messaging while Trump recovers, upended those plans.

Biden himself and a number of top Democratic lawmakers have urged voters to “lower the temperature” surrounding politics following the attack on Trump.

“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 normalized,” the president stated Sunday night. “Unity is the most elusive goal of all, but nothing is important as that right now. We’ll debate and we’ll disagree. That’s not going to change. But it’s going — we’re not going to lose sight of the fact who we are as Americans.”

“We have to reduce the rhetoric and the tone. I’d urge folks to turn off their phones and get off of social media today. And take some time with your family and reflect on who we are as a nation and who we want to be,” Sen. Chris Coons (D-DE) said that morning in an interview on Meet the Press.

“President Biden sets the tone for his campaign, but there’s also a sense of urgency from aides to continue with this momentum,” one veteran Democratic strategist told the Washington Examiner.

Following the first 2024 debate with Trump, Biden launched a full-court press aimed at easing concerns about his candidacy among Democratic power players.

Biden’s outreach slowed, though never fully bottled, the drip of Democratic lawmakers calling on the president to exit the race, and a string of polls published over the weekend showed Biden remaining competitive with Trump.

Fox News now shows Trump up one on the president following the debate, compared to a 2-point Biden lead heading into Atlanta.

Trump also led Biden by 2 points in the NBC News poll, the same margin he held over the president in NBC’s previous poll in April.

And CBS News’s latest battleground poll shows Trump up 2 points over Biden across seven critical swing states, virtually unchanged from the week prior.

“The president appears to have fended off the worst calls for change atop the ticket, and the campaign needs to press his advantage,” a Democratic operative close to the Biden campaign assessed. “But now, everything’s out the window.”

A third Democratic operative sounded anxious about how resuming Biden’s regularly scheduled campaign programming might alienate some voters shocked by the assassination attempt on Trump, and even inflame voices blaming the administration for the attack.

Several prominent Republicans have openly accused Democrats’ rhetoric of fomenting violence against Trump.

“Today is not just some isolated incident,” Vance claimed over the weekend. “The central premise of the Biden campaign is that President Donald Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs. That rhetoric led directly to President Trump’s attempted assassination.”

“For weeks Democrat leaders have been fueling ludicrous hysteria that Donald Trump winning re-election would be the end of democracy in America,” House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-LA), who, like Trump, was also previously shot in an act of targeted political violence, wrote in a press release. “Clearly we’ve seen far left lunatics act on violent rhetoric in the past. This incendiary rhetoric must stop.”

Reporters pressed White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre on those claims during Monday’s press briefing, but she stopped short of saying that Biden regretted any of his past rhetoric framing Trump as a threat to democracy.

Later, in an interview with NBC News’s Lester Holt, Biden expressed regret over his use of the term “bullseye” when describing Trump.

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Biden stressed that he wasn’t speaking literally and only meant to focus attention on Trump. His use of the word was scrutinized following the attempted assassination of Trump on Saturday, and it resulted in his backtracking.

The campaign and Democratic National Committee are expected to resume their RNC counterprogramming later this week.