Joe Biden calls on America to lower temperatures after Donald Trump’s shooting

In a prime-time address at the White House, US President Joe Biden condemned the assassination attempt on his predecessor Donald Trump and told Americans that US policy must never be a “killing field”.

Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, was injured in the ear when a gunman opened fire at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, killing one person and seriously wounding two others in the attack.

In his Oval Office address – only the third of his presidency – Biden urged Americans to “take a step back” and warned that “the political rhetoric in this country has become very heated.”

“No matter how strong our convictions, we must never resort to violence,” Biden said in a nearly seven-minute speech.

His brief but powerful speech went largely smoothly, although he remains under scrutiny in public for a series of verbal slip-ups.

In his prime-time address, the president called on Americans to come together and warned that the November election would be “a testing time” due to increasing political polarization.

In the pre-election opinion polls, Biden and Trump remain neck and neck.

Behind his Resolute Desk, Mr Biden listed a growing number of political violence that has taken place in recent years.

“We cannot and must not go down this path again. We have gone down it before in our history,” he said, referring to the shootings of members of Congress from both parties, the attack on the husband of former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the riots on January 6.

“In America, we resolve our differences at the ballot box,” he said. “At the ballot box. Not with bullets.”

Saturday’s attack shocked America, as Trump was hit in the ear shortly after he began his speech in Butler, Pennsylvania.

Pictures that went around the world showed the 78-year-old with blood dripping from his ear and face and his fist clenched in defiance as Secret Service agents dragged him off the stage and into a waiting car.

The gunman – identified by the FBI as 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks – was shot dead at the scene by Secret Service agents. Law enforcement officials told the BBC’s US partner CBS News they discovered explosives in his vehicle nearby and in his home.

Officials say they are still investigating what the motive for the attack was. Crooks was a registered Republican who had already donated $15 to a liberal campaign group in 2021, according to media reports.

Classmates described him as a quiet young man who was bullied at school. A local gun club near his home in Pennsylvania confirmed he was a member.

In his speech, Biden said he was praying for the family of Corey Comperatore, a 50-year-old former firefighter who was shot and killed during the rally – along with two others who were seriously injured. The father of two was killed as he shielded his family from bullets that whizzed past Trump and struck members of the audience.

Mr Biden called Mr Comperatore a “hero” who was killed “while simply exercising his freedom to support a candidate of his choice”.

Trump allies immediately blamed President Biden and his campaign team for the attack, claiming the leading Democrat was trying to stoke fears of his rival’s return to office.

“The central premise of the Biden campaign is that President Donald Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs,” wrote JD Vance, a Republican senator who is under consideration for the vice presidential nomination, on X, formerly Twitter.

President Biden avoided addressing these criticisms in his speech Sunday evening, even though his campaign has temporarily withdrawn its attack ads against Trump.

The former president himself has tried to strike a conciliatory tone since the shooting. He thanked his Secret Service for its quick intervention and called on citizens to “stand united” and “show our true character as Americans.”

He arrived in Milwaukee on Sunday evening for the Republican Party convention, where he will accept his party’s nomination for president.

Trump is also expected to announce his running mate. US media reported that only three men are still being considered for the vice-presidential post: Senator Marco Rubio from Florida, Governor of North Dakota Doug Burgum and Senator Vance from Ohio.

In a press conference on Sunday, the Secret Service had stated that there were no plans to take additional security measures around the party convention and that they were satisfied with the existing precautions.

The agency is increasingly coming under scrutiny as it tries to find out how Crooks was able to get so close to Trump, even though members of the audience had allegedly reported him to the police.