As Saturday’s assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump complicates Democrats’ strategy leading up to this fall’s election, US President Joe Biden has found a new target of attack for his floundering campaign: pro-Palestine protesters.
The plan was revealed during an interview between senior Biden administration officials and the British news outlet Reuters one day after the shooting.
“This changes everything,” said one campaign operative of the shocking event. “We’re still assessing. Making the case against Trump, drawing that split screen will get much harder.”
In response, the president’s team has devised a strategy of criticizing a “climate of violence” and will seek to “draw on the president’s history of condemning all sorts of political violence including his sharp criticism of the ‘disorder’ created by campus protests over the Israel-Gaza conflict.”
Biden’s campaign was reportedly previously set to craft a message condemning the former president’s character, a strategy employed by former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s failed 2016 candidacy. Central to the plan were attacks on Trump over his recent felony conviction in the Stormy Daniels hush money case and attempts to overturn the results of the 2020 election.
The octogenarian president’s task will be complicated by the fact many Democratic Party voters, and increasing numbers of Americans as a whole, now side with Palestinians in the long running conflict over the Israeli ethnonationalist colonial project.
A string of peaceful protests against Israel’s deadly campaign in Gaza took place on US college campuses earlier this year, with students demanding their universities disclose and divest from financial interests tied to the Zionist occupation. Mainstream media frequently portrayed the demonstrations as threatening and anti-Semitic, although the most notable instances of violence were spurred by police and pro-Israel counterprotesters.
The Israeli military has killed nearly 38,700 during its months-long operation in the Gaza Strip, although the figure is thought to undercount thousands of people trapped underneath the rubble of IDF airstrikes.
A recent study by British medical journal The Lancet estimated the ultimate death toll of the conflict will exceed 186,000. More than half of the dead are thought to be women and children, including six-year-old Hind Rajab, who was killed after an Israeli tank operator fired 355 bullets at the car carrying the young girl and her mother.