In a prime-time address, Biden warned against election-year rhetoric, saying “it’s time to calm down.”

President Joe Biden on July 14 warned of the risk of political violence in the United States following Saturday’s assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump, saying “it’s time to calm things down.”

In a prime-time address to the nation from the Oval Office, Biden said political passions would flare but “we must never let this descend into violence.”

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“There is no place in America for this kind of violence, any kind of violence. Never. Period. No exceptions. We cannot allow this kind of violence to be normalized,” Biden said.

Speaking from the Oval Office for about five minutes, Biden said the Republican National Convention would kick off in Milwaukee on Monday while he would travel around the country in his re-election bid.

He said passions will run high on both sides and the stakes of the election will be huge.

Read also: Live updates on the Trump rally shooting

“We can do this,” Biden said, saying the country was built on a democracy where reason and balance have a chance to prevail over violence. “In American democracy, debate is conducted in good faith. In American democracy, the rule of law is respected. Civility, dignity and fair play are not just quaint concepts, they are lived realities.”

Biden condemned the assassination attempt on his predecessor Trump early Sunday as “antithetical to everything we stand for as a nation” and said he would order an independent national security investigation into how such an attack could have happened.

He called for the country to “stand together as one nation,” promised a “thorough and swift” investigation and urged people “not to speculate” about the shooter’s motives or affiliations.

The president also said he had instructed the US Secret Service to review all security arrangements for the Republican National Convention. Hours later, Secret Service convention coordinator Audrey Gibson Cicchino said the weekend attack on Trump had not changed the agency’s security plans for the convention and that officials were “fully prepared.”

In his speech, Biden said the attacks on Trump were “not who we are as a people.”

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“This is un-American, and we cannot allow this to happen,” he said. “Unity is the hardest goal to achieve, but nothing is more important right now.”

The president said he and first lady Jill Biden were praying for the family of Corey Comperatore, a former fire chief who was shot and killed during a Trump rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, on Saturday night.

“He was protecting his family from bullets,” Biden said. “God love him.”

The president also said he had a “brief but meaningful conversation” with Trump in the hours after the shooting, and said he was “profoundly grateful” that the former president was “in good health and recovering.”

Trump, who has called for the nation to recover since the shooting, posted to his social media accounts in response to Biden’s comments: “Let’s unite America!”

Achieving unity in reality will be much harder, especially in the midst of a fierce presidential campaign, as Biden’s team struggles to calibrate its course going forward in the wake of a weekend attack on the very man he is trying to defeat in the November election.

Biden, who has sought to portray Trump as a serious threat to democracy and the nation’s founding principles, has paused such political messaging. Immediately after Saturday night’s attack, Biden’s reelection campaign froze “all outgoing communications” and was working to pull its TV ads.

The president also postponed a trip planned for Monday to Texas, where he was scheduled to speak at the Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library to mark the 60th anniversary of the Civil Rights Act. Biden’s interview with NBC News host Lester Holt will take place at the White House instead of in Texas as originally scheduled.

Biden’s campaign team NBC The interview will air on Monday night, but the company and the DNC plan to “continue to draw contrasts” with Trump throughout the Republican convention, though it’s unclear when the ads will resume.

Biden also still plans to schedule a trip to Las Vegas that includes a campaign stop on Wednesday, while Vice President Kamala Harris postponed a campaign trip to Florida on Tuesday where she was scheduled to meet with Republican women.

Meanwhile, Trump announced he was moving up plans to attend Milwaukee and the Republican National Convention, where criticism of Biden and the Democrats is sure to intensify.

The weekend developments were just the latest turmoil in an extraordinarily chaotic election campaign in recent weeks.

Biden’s shaky performance in the June 27 debate so rattled his own party that some top supporters and donors turned on him and nearly two dozen Democrats called on the president to drop out of the race. As doubts grow about whether Biden is fit for a second term, he and his top advisers have been scrambling to salvage the race by adding more events around the country and criticizing Trump more harshly.

Saturday’s attack eclipsed, at least for now, the pushback on the eve of the Republican convention.

The campaign is also hoping that Biden will use an Oval Office address on Sunday to double down on his claims of unity and provide leadership to ease nervous criticism within his party.

“We will debate and we will disagree. That won’t change,” Biden said in an afternoon speech, “but we will never lose sight of who we are as Americans.”

While investigators are still in the early stages of determining what happened and why, some Biden critics have faulted the president for telling donors in a private call on Monday that “it’s time to go on the offensive against Trump.”

The president was trying to argue that Trump had gotten away with a light public schedule after last month’s debate while he faced intense scrutiny, according to a person familiar with the comments, who spoke on condition of anonymity to speak more freely about private conversations.

“I have one job to do, and that’s to defeat Donald Trump. … I believe I’m the best person to do that,” Biden said on a call with donors.

He continued, “So, enough about the debate. Time to attack Trump. He’s had nothing to do for the last 10 days except ride around in a golf cart and brag about scores he didn’t get. … Either way, I’m not getting involved in his golf game.”