How do you turn the temperature down when you’re running against Donald Trump?

Already beset by a drumbeat of Democrats calling on the president to end his candidacy, President Joe Biden is reluctant to significantly dial back his sharpest attacks on Donald Trump, continuing to assert that the Republican is a threat to American democracy.

Three days after the attempted assassination of Trump on Saturday, Biden plans to adjust his arguments against Trump to be more about his policies than the man himself, according to four campaign officials and Democrats. Some rhetoric will be toned down, they say.

But as his campaign restarts on Tuesday, the president and his team plan to avoid quoting Trump’s and his allies’ most incendiary phrases like “bloodbath” and “America’s Hitler” that have previously dotted Democratic messaging, according to the people.

It’s far from certain whether Biden can maintain that kind of message discipline. On Monday night, in an interview with NBC's Lester Holt two days after the shooting — one of several closely watched media engagements designed to ease concerns about his fitness for office — Biden quoted Trump’s line from a March rally in which he predicted a “bloodbath” if he loses.

Democrats acknowledge that Biden faces a fundamental challenge navigating the post-shooting environment, which came as Biden was already facing intense and constant scrutiny from fellow Democrats, Republicans and the media in the wake of his debate performance against Trump three weeks ago.

“He’s going to make a real clear contrast between his optimistic vision for the future, and he’s going to keep talking about what’s at stake in this election,” said campaign Chair Jen O’Malley Dillon, who said Biden would continue to “reject the Republicans’ extreme agenda.”

Biden and his team have been navigating the altered dynamics of the campaign since Saturday night, when Biden gave orders to pull down ads and suspend future advertising. Biden made three public appearances over the weekend — including a prime-time Oval Office address to the nation — in which he called for an end to political violence and for Americans to lower the temperature in its partisan rhetoric.

Instructions were given to aides not to respond publicly to pundits who saw the image of a wounded, defiant Trump — his fist raised and his face streaked with blood — and declared the race over, according to three of the officials. But they also gave little credence to the idea that the shooting meant the campaign could no longer run a fierce campaign — as Biden himself articulated on Sunday night in an address from the Oval Office.

Rhetorical changes aside, the overall messaging will be the same: Despite the tragedy in Pennsylvania, democracy will still be on the ballot.

“The shooting was unacceptable. And so was what happened on January 6 and what happened to Paul Pelosi,” said one of the officials who was not authorized to speak publicly about internal campaign conversations. “The stakes are too high on too many issues, and the president is absolutely going to keep making that clear.”

The president has tried in multiple speeches since the shooting to calm the country’s frayed nerves, calling on politicians of all stripes to lower the temperature. But behind the scenes, he and his campaign are continuing their frantic effort, now in its third week, to get his campaign on track. Amid continuing defections from Democrats calling for him to step aside as the party’s nominee, Biden now must figure out how to shift the focus to Trump and his agenda after an assassination attempt that has — at least for the moment — transformed an incendiary candidate who has mocked violent attacks on rivals and incited the Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection into a victim.

Biden’s first of three interviews this week, the sit-down with NBC News , underscored the difficulty of threading this delicate political needle against this particular opponent. Less than 48 hours after the shooting, Biden, asked about his own rhetoric, felt compelled to point out that Trump’s rhetoric has been far more incendiary than his own.

Explaining his own declaration to donors last week that it was time to put Trump “in a bullseye,” Biden said he was only suggesting that it was time to “focus on him, focus on what he’s doing,” although he acknowledged that the phrase itself was “a mistake.” But he referenced Trump’s past statements about wanting to be “a dictator on day one” and his repeated refusals to accept the outcome of elections in explaining why his own claims about the threat Trump poses to democracy are justified and important, not overheated rhetoric that some Republicans, in the shooting’s aftermath, have claimed incited the shooter.

“How do you talk about the threat to democracy, which is real, when [Trump] says things like he says?” Biden said. “Do you just not say anything because it may incite somebody? I have not engaged in that rhetoric. My opponent has engaged in that rhetoric, talking about a ‘bloodbath’ if he loses.”

Biden spent much of the interview going after Trump, including when Holt asked him a series of questions about his shaky debate performance. “Why don’t you guys ever talk about the 28 lies he told [in the debate]?” Biden asked Holt as he leaned toward him, visibly frustrated. “Where are ya? Why doesn’t the press ever talk about that?”

Even if the shooting doesn’t absolve Trump of his past actions and statements, Biden’s team still recognizes that the Republican nominee is poised to get a positive bump from surviving the assassination attempt and the four-day Republican convention in Milwaukee. While Trump appears ascendant, Biden continues to battle significant political headwinds since his faltering showing in last month’s debate, including slipping battleground state poll numbers, fundraising worries and a push from some in his own party to replace him atop the ticket.

In his appearances Tuesday and Wednesday in Las Vegas, and two interviews he’ll give while there to BET and Univision Radio, more care will be given to avoid rhetoric that could inflame a tinderbox nation — and to provide a video clip, the president’s aides said, that could be taken out of context by their Republican foes. But the central issues of Biden’s campaign will also remain the same, including abortion rights, health care, Project 2025 and the need to protect Social Security and Medicare.

"As we move through this moment and especially in the fall as people are thinking about who they're going to vote for, if you care about reproductive rights, you're still going to be looking at the contrast," said Karen Finney, a Democratic consultant who served as senior adviser and spokesperson on Hillary Clinton's 2016 campaign. "It may be that the way we make these arguments and talk about them changes. But people still care about these issues that affect their daily lives."

And many influential Democrats believe Biden should be leaning harder into his defense of democracy, which has animated his entire presidency — beginning with his condemnation of the racist Charlottesville, Virginia, rally in 2017 and through the U.S. Capitol insurrection.

"The reality is Donald Trump is a threat to democracy, period," said Joe Trippi, a Democratic consultant who ran Howard Dean's presidential campaign in 2004. "We need to make clear it's democracy itself — at the ballot box — where we have to defeat him and that no violence is acceptable, not the January 6 insurrection or the lone shooter.”

But, he continued, “there's no one more responsible for questioning that system, for inciting his supporters to try to subvert the peaceful transfer of power, than Donald Trump.”

“I’ll continue to speak out strongly for our democracy, stand up for our Constitution and the rule of law, to call for action at the ballot box, no violence on our streets,” Biden said. “That’s how democracy should work. We debate and disagree.”

While events in Texas slated for Monday were canceled and the interview with NBC was moved from Austin to the White House, aides decided to resume the campaign as of Tuesday with a Nevada swing meant to firm up the Democrats’ weakened coalition of Black and Latino voters, with events slated at the NAACP annual convention and UnidosUS.

“The fact that there was an attempt on his life does not change the threat Trump poses to American democracy,” said Eddie Glaude, a professor of American history at Princeton University and occasional adviser to the president. “They have to continue to tell the truth about the danger he presents and they have to tell the truth about the political climate that in some ways produced him and he has fostered.”

Although they acknowledge that the calls for Biden to quit the race risk weakening an incumbent who has been emphatic about sticking it out, some Democrats who believe Biden can’t win still hold out hope that, if faced with increasingly poor polling and fundraising, or more calls to quit, he may still be convinced to step aside for Vice President Kamala Harris.

But Biden’s inner circle and family believe the race can still be won. Polls show a tight race and the impact of the shooting remains unclear. Most in Wilmington scoff at the idea that the race is now over, noting that a bump in Ronald Reagan’s approval rating after he was shot in 1981 receded quickly, and Theodore Roosevelt’s third-party bid in 1912 was unsuccessful even after he was shot in the chest during the final weeks of that campaign.