This would have been an interesting, and perhaps a much more understandable, speech for a retiring president to give. However, Joe Biden is not leaving this race, and it seems that some Democrats, after Saturday’s shocking assassination attempt, are throwing in the towel on 2024.

At a time when President Joe Biden has been struggling to shore up support with fellow Democrats following a miserable June debate performance and shaky cleanup effort, some professional Democratic political operatives said Saturday’s shooting will end up sealing the incumbent’s electoral fate.

“We’re so beyond f—ed,” one longtime Democratic insider said, noting that the image of Trump thrusting his fist in the air, with blood dramatically smeared across his face, will be indelible.

“The presidential contest ended last night,” said a veteran Democratic consultant, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to give a candid assessment of his own party’s standing less than four months before the election.

“Now it’s time to focus on keeping the Senate and trying to pick up the House,” he said. “The only positive thing to come out of last night for Democrats is we are no longer talking about Joe Biden’s age today.”

One Democratic strategist who has worked on multiple presidential campaigns and on Capitol Hill said that the physical targeting of Trump robs Biden of his main argument against the former president. Biden, the strategist pointed out, has tried to convince voters that Trump is so extreme that he presents a threat to democracy.

“That message is dead,” the strategist said, after a gunman tried to kill the presumptive nominee of one of the two major parties. The bullet that struck Trump “probably saved Biden’s nomination” by freezing Democratic calls for him to step aside and “doomed his re-election.”

Joe Biden tried twice – in short statements – to assert some presidential gravitas and decry the political violence that had occurred. On Sunday afternoon, during his second two-minute statement, he said that he would be delivering a speech from the Oval Office on Sunday evening. While his staff assured everyone that it would be delivered live, everyone also knew that it would be on a teleprompter. And it was, and it was clear that Joe Biden’s line of sight was tracking the teleprompter, and not the camera.

If you didn’t see the speech live, it can be viewed here. All six minutes and 24 seconds of it. Yes, that’s all. It was 8 pm Eastern time, and we all know that Joe can’t stay up late, even if his aides keep adding things to his schedule.

Perhaps this short address from the Oval Office wouldn’t have felt so lacking if he hadn’t given two previous statements which also had nothing regarding the investigation into the shooter, and if Biden himself wasn’t on video saying things like this THE DAY BEFORE THE ATTEMPTED ASSASSINATION.

"Most importantly, and I mean this from the bottom of my heart, Trump is a threat to this nation." – Joe Biden yesterday pic.twitter.com/31lNO7bk3p

— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) July 14, 2024

But what is old Joe saying now? Let’s look at the official transcript, because there were a few flubs.

My fellow Americans, I want to speak to you tonight about the need for us to lower the temperature in our politics and to remember, 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.

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.

Thankfully, former [President] Trump is not seriously linjured [injured]. I spoke with him last night. I’m grateful he’s doing well. And Jill and I keep him and his family in our prayers.

The White House transcription team had some “corrections” to make, as you can see and hear.

We debate and disagree. We compare and contrast the character of the candidates, the records, the issues, the agenda, the vision for America.

But in America, we resolve our differences at the battol [ballot] box. You know, that’s how we do it, at the battol [ballot] box, not with bullets. The power to change America should always rest in the hands of the people, not in the hands of a would-be assassin.

What was most interesting, though, were the incidents of political violence that Joe Biden chose to highlight.

We cannot — we must not go down this road in America. We’ve traveled it before throughout our history. Violence has never been the answer, whether it’s with members of Congress in both parties being targeted in the shot, or a violent mob attacking the Capitol on January 6th, or a brutal attack on the spouse of former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, or information and intimidation on election officials, or the kidnapping plot against a sitting governor, or an attempted assassination on Donald Trump.

Uh, those are the examples that Team Biden thought would sound the best? Really? People noticed that there were some pretty big misses here – and they were significantly one-sided.

Because to mention that, or the Kavanaugh assassination attempt, or any other left-wing violence would be to admit where much of this is coming from.

So instead, it was Gretchen Whitmer. https://t.co/ye1O61aTFo

— Bonchie (@bonchieredstate) July 15, 2024

Biden urged everyone to “lower the temperature” without acknowledging in the least that he himself is just as responsible for using the same rhetoric. And that makes his speech much less impactful, because it rings so very hollow. The dodging of responsibility, while demanding that everyone else “unify” and calm down, is obvious.

The message of unity is a good one, but Biden is the wrong messenger. Donald Trump is proving again that he has much better political instincts than he had four years ago, and says he is rewriting his convention speech in order to call for “national unity.”

In an exclusive interview with the Washington Examiner a day after being hit by a sniper’s bullet, Trump said he wanted to take advantage of a historic moment and draw the country together.

“The speech I was going to give on Thursday was going to be a humdinger,” he said, “Had this not happened, this would’ve been one of the most incredible speeches” aimed mostly at the policies of President Joe Biden. “Honestly, it’s going to be a whole different speech now.”

He has switched, he said, from planning to excite his voter base to one that demonstrates his belief that the attack on him at a rally in Pennsylvania had changed the election campaign entirely. Both Republicans and Democrats have acknowledged this in the aftermath of Saturday’s shocking incident.

Trump said people all across the country from different walks of life and different political views have called him, and he noted that he was saved from death because he turned from the crowd to look at a screen showing data he was using in his speech.

“That reality is just setting in,” he said. “I rarely look away from the crowd. Had I not done that in that moment, well, we would not be talking today, would we?”

Talking as he boarded his plane in Bedminster, New Jersey, for Milwaukee, where the Republican National Convention starts Monday and lasts through Thursday, Trump said his speech will meet the moment that history demands. “It is a chance to bring the country together. I was given that chance.”

“This is a chance to bring the whole country, even the whole world, together. The speech will be a lot different, a lot different than it would’ve been two days ago,” he said.

Trump said his decision to raise his hand when the Secret Service was leading him off stage was to let the people there know he was OK, “And that America goes on, we go forward, that we are strong,” he said.

Trump said when he stood up and saw the crowd had not moved, he needed to tell them that he and the country were going to be OK. “The energy coming from the people there in that moment, they just stood there; it’s hard to describe what that felt like, but I knew the world was looking. I knew that history would judge this, and I knew I had to let them know we are OK.”

We were only centimeters away from reenacting 1968. Instead, it became 1912. And in the spirit of Pope John Paul II, Donald Trump is recognizing that there was Divine intervention that spared him. Trump is correct that he has a chance to unify the country. Joe Biden can’t do it, not after years of demonizing the other side of the aisle and caving to the radicals on the left – which is why his Oval Office speech won’t be remembered at all in a week. But depending on what Donald Trump says at the convention, his coming speech might live forever in the history books.

Featured image: original Victory Girls art by Darleen Click