Time to cool it down, Biden tells divided America

President Joe Biden sought to calm a divided nation in the wake of an assassination attempt on Donald Trump, saying in a rare Oval Office address it was time to lower the temperature of America's hostile politics.

"You know, the political record in this country has gotten very heated. It's time to cool it down," Biden said.

Biden added that US politics "must never be a literal battlefield, God forbid, a killing field."

The 81-year-old Democrat said both sides had a responsibility to ease the situation ahead of a deeply polarized election that would now be a "time of testing" for the United States.

The short but forceful speech went without any major hitches - bar Biden twice referring to the ballot box as "battle box" - with the aging president under close scrutiny following a disastrous debate performance against Trump recently.

The president also said he'd had a "short but good conversation" with Trump in the hours after the shootings and said he was "sincerely grateful" the former president is "doing well and recovering."

Trump, who has called for national resilience since the shooting, posted on his social media account after Biden's remarks, "Unite America!"

Biden said he was ordering an independent security review of how such an attack could have happened.

He also praised the bystander who was killed, identified as firefighter Corey Comperatore, saying he "was protecting his family from the bullets."

Biden, who has set out to brand Trump as a dire threat to democracy and the nation's very founding principles, put a temporary pause on such political messaging. Shortly after the attack, Biden's reelection campaign froze "all outbound communications" and was working to pull down its television ads.

The president also postponed a planned trip to Texas, where he was to speak on the 60th anniversary of the Civil Rights Act at the Lyndon B Johnson presidential library.

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