Other Democratic candidates running this year are also rethinking their plans, focusing on the dangers that Trump poses if elected.
 "Biden and Democrats panic as Trump assassination plot disrupts election campaign")
Rather than attacking Trump in the coming days, the White House and Biden team will likely rely on the president’s history of condemning all political violence | Image: BloombergReuters
President Joe Biden’s re-election campaign is scrambling to come up with a new strategy, including suspending attacks on the former president for the time being, following an assassination attempt on Republican rival Donald Trump in western Pennsylvania.
Within hours of Saturday’s shooting, the Biden campaign pulled its television ads and halted other political communications, including one that highlighted Trump’s May conviction in New York state court on felony charges related to paying hush money to a porn actress to stave off a sex scandal before the 2016 presidential election.
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Rather than attacking Trump in the coming days, the White House and Biden team plan to leverage the president’s record of condemning all political violence, including his sharp criticism of the “chaos” caused by campus protests over the Israel-Gaza conflict, according to a campaign official who spoke on condition of anonymity.
Biden’s advisers had wanted to toe the line on recent calls from Democratic lawmakers that Biden should step aside after the Nov. 5 election and let another candidate lead the party, and instead focus on the dangers Trump poses to American democratic norms and reproductive rights, as well as his false claims that he won the 2020 election.
“This changes everything,” one campaign official said of the assassination attempt. “It’s still being evaluated. It’s going to be a lot harder to make claims against Trump, to draw that split screen.” “The president is trying to de-escalate,” the official added.
Biden campaign officials said they expected the assassination attempt to lessen pressure from Democrats in Congress for Biden, 81, to drop out of the race amid concerns about his fitness to serve as president. Some Democrats in the House and Senate have publicly called on Biden to drop out of the race following his shaky performance in a debate with Trump in June.
Biden was scheduled to visit the Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library in Austin, Texas, on Monday, where he was scheduled to speak about the landmark civil rights laws Johnson signed into law in the 1960s and criticize Trump’s attacks on immigrants and American diversity, but officials said the visit was under review and may be canceled.
Because the shooting took place in Pennsylvania, a battleground state where Biden narrowly defeated Trump in the 2020 presidential election, some political strategists say the incident could have a particularly big impact in terms of increasing voter turnout for the Republican Party among voters sympathetic to Trump.
“This does not guarantee that Trump will flip Pennsylvania,” Republican pollster Frank Luntz wrote on social media, “but it makes the long and winding road for Joe Biden even longer and more winding. Just as what happened to George Floyd had a lasting impact on tens of millions of Americans, the shooting of Donald Trump will have significant consequences in ways the shooter never intended.”
Floyd was a black man who was killed by a white police officer in Minneapolis in 2020, and his murder sparked protests in many U.S. cities and abroad.
Other Democratic candidates running this year are also rethinking their plans, focusing on the dangers that Trump poses if elected.
“The real question is whether in two weeks we can go back and declare Trump a national threat? That’s our strategy, and it’s fair, but it’s unclear how much of our spurs have been missed,” said a Democrat involved in the Senate campaign, speaking on condition of anonymity.
(Only the headline and photo of this report may have been modified by Business Standard staff. The rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
