Author: Jarrett Renshaw and Nandita Bose
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – U.S. President Joe Biden’s re-election campaign is scrambling to formulate a new strategy following the assassination of Republican rival Donald Trump in western Pennsylvania, including a decision to temporarily cancel the campaign against the former president. attack.
Within hours of Saturday’s shooting, Biden’s campaign pulled television ads and suspended other political communications, including those highlighting Trump’s felony conviction in a New York state court on charges related to his previous conviction. Hush money paid to porn stars to avoid sex scandals.
Rather than attacking Trump in the coming days, the White House and Biden campaign will draw on the president’s history of condemning all kinds of political violence, including his sharp criticism of the “chaos” caused by campus protests over the Israel-Gaza conflict. campaign officials spoke on condition of anonymity.
Biden’s advisers had hoped to quell recent calls from some fellow Democrats and others to step down and allow another candidate to represent the party in the Nov. 5 election, giving him a greater focus on what he said was Trump’s The dangers posed by American democratic norms.
“This changes everything,” one campaign official said of the assassination attempt. “We’re still evaluating. It’s going to be more difficult to draw a split picture of the allegations against Trump.”
“The president is working hard to bring the temperature down,” the official added.
Biden campaign officials said they expected the assassination attempt would ease pressure on congressional Democrats to step down the 81-year-old Biden over concerns about his fitness for public office. Some Democrats in the House and Senate publicly called on Biden to withdraw due to his poor performance in the June debate with Trump.
Biden plans to travel to the Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library in Austin, Texas, on Monday, where he is expected to speak on the landmark civil rights bill Johnson signed in the 1960s and criticize Trump’s policies on immigration and the U.S. Diversity of attacks.
Because the shooting occurred in Pennsylvania, an electoral battleground state that Biden narrowly won over Trump in 2020, the incident could be particularly impactful, according to some political strategists, by increasing sympathy for Trump Republican turnout among popular voters.
“There’s no guarantee that Trump will flip Pennsylvania,” Republican pollster Frank Luntz wrote on social media. “But Joe Biden’s long and winding road gets even longer and more difficult. As George Just as Floyd’s incident has had a lasting impact on tens of millions of Americans, Donald Trump’s shooting will have unprecedented consequences.
Floyd was a black man killed by a white police officer in Minneapolis in 2020, a murder that sparked protests in many U.S. cities and abroad.
Other Democratic candidates in this year’s race are also rethinking their plans, focusing on what they say is the danger posed by Trump’s election.
“The real question is whether we can go back in two weeks and declare Trump a threat to the country. That’s our playbook, and that’s fair, but it’s unclear how much of our spurs have been taken away,” said one participant in the Senate Democrats said.
