US President Joe Biden has condemned the assassination attempt on his predecessor Donald Trump in a primetime address from the White House, telling Americans that US politics must never be a “killing field”.

Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee for president, was wounded in the ear after a gunman opened fire at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. One person was killed and two more were critically injured in the attack.

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

“No matter how strong our convictions, we must never descend into violence,” Biden said in remarks that lasted just under seven minutes.

His short, but forceful, address largely went off without a hitch, amid ongoing scrutiny following a number of high-profile verbal slips.

In his primetime address, Biden called on Americans to come together and warned that increasing political polarization meant November’s election would be “a time of testing”.

Biden and Trump remain locked neck-and-neck in opinion polls ahead of the election.

Speaking from behind the Resolute Desk, Biden listed off a growing number of violent political acts that have taken place in recent years.

“We cannot, must not, go down this road again. We’ve travelled it before in our history,” he said, citing shootings targeting congressional members in both parties, the assault on ex-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband and the 6 January riots.

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

BBC