What it will take to calm America

On Sunday evening, President Joe Biden spoke from the Oval Office, calling on Americans to temper their passions. In the aftermath of the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump, Biden reiterated his message that there is no room for violence in our politics and that everyone needs to take a breath and calm down. The nation needs to “lower the temperature,” he said. “No matter how strong our convictions,” Biden added, we must “never descend into violence.”

Will the message work? Coming at a pivotal moment in his own reelection campaign against Trump, Biden’s address is something of a stress test for what presidents can accomplish when political tensions spin out of control. Biden’s appeal is not coming in a vacuum; many political leaders across the spectrum have denounced the attack on Trump and called for calm. House Speaker Mike Johnson said on CNN Sunday,

“The rhetoric has consequences. When you have a heated environment and you have political division in this country, like we have in the age of social media, everything is amplified, and everyone can go on and turn the dial. So we need to work on bringing that down so that we can have thoughtful debate and we can have policy discussions.”