President Joe Biden addressed the nation Sunday night from the Oval Office in the wake of an assassination attempt on his predecessor and political rival, Donald Trump, urging Americans to “unite” and collectively “lower the temperature in our politics.”
It was a speech about fundamentals.
“Disagreement,” the president said, was “inevitable,” not just to American democracy but to “human nature itself.”
The task before the country, Biden continued the night after the attempted assassination of Trump, was to disagree vigorously without allowing that disagreement to turn the political arena into “a literal battlefield or God forbid, a killing field.”
“We stand for an America, not of extremism and fury, but of decency and grace,” the president said, adding that, ahead of the Nov. 5 election, the country faces “a time of testing as the…
