US President Biden addressed the nation from the Oval Office in a televised message after the shocking attack on former US President and 2024 election candidate Donald Trump on Sunday.
President Biden urged US citizens to “lower the temperature” on their politics, reminding everyone that “violence is not the answer.”
“While we may disagree, we are not enemies. We’re neighbors. We’re friends, coworkers, citizens. And, most importantly, we are fellow Americans. And we must stand together,” the US leader said in a message of unity.
“Yesterday’s shooting at Donald Trump’s rally in Pennsylvania calls on all of us to take a step back, take stock of where we are, how we go forward from here,” he added.
President Biden said he felt grateful that Trump was doing well, and paid tribute to the innocent victim of the shooter: “Corey was a husband, a father, a volunteer firefighter, a hero, sheltering his family from those bullets. We should all hold his family and all those injured in our prayers.”
Violence not normalized, politics not a literal battlefield
Drawing a comparison with past violent incidents in American history -such as the invasion of the Capitol on January 6, 2021- President Biden warned that “we must not go down this road” and was adamant that “there is no place in America for this kind of violence or for any violence ever”.
“No exceptions. We can’t allow this violence to be normalized,” he stated.
“The political rhetoric in this country has gotten very heated. It’s time to cool it down. And we all have a responsibility to do that,” President Biden observed. “Disagreement is inevitable in American democracy. It’s part of human nature. But politics must never be a literal battlefield and, God forbid, a killing field,” he continued.
Differences are resolved at the ballot box, not with bullets, the US President stressed: “The power to change America should always rest in the hands of the people, not in the hands of a would-be assassin.”
Trump’s first interview after surviving attack
Washington Examiner’s reporter Salena Zito, who was attending the Pennsylvania rally with her photojournalist daughter and witnessed the attack, talked to CNN about her interview with Donald Trump after the assassination attempt.
Zito had a scheduled interview with the former President for the evening after the rally, so later that day he called her, also asking whether she and her daughter were well following the events.
Zito told CNN’s Abby Phillip that Donald Trump was in a very good mood and “sounded incredibly upbeat” during their telephone interview.
“In that moment, he understood that everything had changed. For the country and for himself,” she commented.
According to the journalist, Donald Trump will be focusing on “bringing the country back together” from now on.
Speaking about the “iconic moment” when he raised his fist to the audience after the attack, Trump told her that “it wasn’t about him at that moment.”
“He wanted to project to the country in that moment that everything was ok, that he was ok and the country was ok,” Zito revealed.
In the hours following the attack, Donald Trump has been taking phonecalls and talking to people of all different political stripes, of all different stations in life, receiving positive feedback, she added.
