President Biden says that “the political rhetoric in this country has gotten very heated. It’s time to cool it down.” He’s right, of course, but he’d have more credibility if he had added, “…and, unfortunately, I’ve been part of the problem.”
Just a few days before the attempt on Donald Trump’s life, Joe Biden was on the campaign trail telling Americans that Trump is “even more dangerous now” than he was the last time he ran for president. “He says if he loses, there will be a bloodbath.” Of course, Trump had clearly been talking about an economic bloodbath in terms of jobs lost if foreign cars were allowed to flood U.S. markets without tariffs.
If Biden didn’t know that, he should have. But if he did know the context and ignored it to pick up some cheap political points, then he doesn’t deserve the benefit of the doubt now that he’s supposedly taking the high road and asking the rest of us to “cool it down.”
And at the NAACP convention in Las Vegas this week, Biden repeated his message about how “Our politics have become too heated,” right before he claimed that when Trump was president it was “hell” for Black Americans.
How does talk like that cool things down?
Biden can’t run on his record, not when he’s underwater by wide margins on almost every issue that voters care about. So the strategy has been to tear into Trump every chance he gets, telling voters that Trump is an existential threat to democracy.
But it will be tough, if not downright impossible, for Biden to run that kind of destructive campaign while also trying to convince Americans that we need to be lower the temperature on campaign rhetoric.
On the other side, Trump is also talking about trying to calm things down. After he was shot, he said he tore up the “extremely tough speech” he planned to deliver to the GOP convention in Milwaukee. He now will deliver a speech, he says, to “unite our country.”
If he really means it, he should do what Biden failed to do in his speech from the Oval Office. Trump has the opportunity to say that his hands aren’t clean, either. He could tell the convention and everyone watching at home that his rhetoric has at times been over the top and that it has contributed to the polarization that is tearing the country apart.
He could do what he has been incapable of doing: admitting he’s made mistakes, acknowledging that at times he put his own political interests over the interests of the American people … and apologizing for it. (For the record, when it comes to admitting mistakes, Biden is no better.)
Something like that could go a long way in winning over moderate voters in those crucial swing states — voters who don’t think Biden is up to the job but need a reason to vote for a divisive figure like Trump.
Trump may win anyway, but admitting that he’s said needlessly nasty things that divided the country, I think, would practically cement his victory in November.
We may never know what motivated the shooter in Pennsylvania. But we do know that words have consequences and can pollute the bloodstream of the country. Call Donald Trump “Hitler” long enough, and you lose your right to be surprised when someone tries to kill “Hitler.” If you tell potential donors — as Joe Biden did — that we need to put Trump in a “bullseye,” then don’t be shocked when the temperature rises to dangerous levels.
Will the pleas for unity amount to anything? I don’t think they will. There are too many village idiots out there willing to believe every screwball conspiracy theory they encounter, so long as it demonizes the other side.
Rep. Mike Collins (R-Ga.) took to social media just minutes after the shooting to say that “Joe Biden sent the orders” for the hit. From the nut-job left we get theories that Trump was the one behind the shooting, in order to generate sympathy for himself, and that the blood we all saw was fake.
Most Americans have more sense than that. Still, at times, it feels like we’re split into two countries — and the attempt on the former president’s life hasn’t done much to bring us together.
Bernard Goldberg (@BernardGoldberg) is an Emmy and an Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University award-winning writer and journalist. He is the author of five books and publishes exclusive weekly columns, audio commentaries and Q&As on his Substack page.