Will Donald Trump do the same?
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The key to an effective presidential speech is saying the right thing at the right moment. By that standard, President Joe Biden’s six-minute Oval Office address last night was a success.
Speaking one day after an assassination attempt against Donald Trump, Biden was gracious, eloquent, and emphatic.
“We cannot, we must not, go down this road in America,” Biden said. “There is no place in America for this kind of violence or for any violence ever. Period. No exceptions. We can’t allow this violence to be normalized.” (Biden, while rightly focusing on the effort to assassinate Trump, also listed several other recent acts of political violence.)
The president urged Americans to “lower the temperature in our politics.” And in the best section in the speech, he said this: “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.” Politics, the president said, should be an arena for peaceful debate and for the pursuit of justice. We debate, we disagree, we compare, and we contrast, “but in America, we resolve our differences at the ballot box.”
In his address, the president was reminding us as much as he was instructing us. He was pleading with Americans to live up to our ideals, to reject extremism and the passions of the mob, to recover a sense of decency and mutual respect in our public discourse.
Biden, at his best, does this pretty well. It’s what he did in 2020, when he talked about “the battle for the soul of America.” It helped him win the presidency.
But even though Biden’s words were at times affecting, the president himself came across as a diminished figure. It’s not simply that he stumbled several times during the speech, though that didn’t help, because it’s yet another reminder of his age. It’s that he comes across as frail, an old man valiantly trying to project that he’s in command of events rather than at their mercy.
America is a seething cauldron of invective and antipathy; the forces that are dividing it are enormously powerful, and they have been building for decades. It would be difficult for any political figure, even the best America has to offer, to repair the breach. Even when he was at the top of his game, Biden wasn’t up to that challenge. This version of Biden certainly isn’t.
Nevertheless, the president deserves credit for trying. His speech last night was an admirable effort at de-escalation. And this needs to be said, too: Biden, whatever his failures and whatever his limitations, is not the reason our politics is at a boil. It is the presumptive Republican nominee who has sought out conflict, who thrives on it, and, as I wrote when he first ran, who has been a promoter of political violence. The despicable violence aimed at Trump on Saturday doesn’t change what we know to be true. And naming what is true, if what is true is malicious, isn’t slander.
Joe Biden has done his part to calm the waters. The question is whether Donald Trump will do the same.
