President Joe Biden called for a de-escalation in political rhetoric but kept up criticism of former President Donald Trump on Monday, in Biden’s first interview since a Saturday assassination attempt on Trump.
Talking to NBC News anchor Lester Holt, Biden said he called the injured Trump on Saturday to convey his well wishes.
But he argued to Holt that Trump, whom Republicans officially nominated as their presidential candidate at their convention Monday, remains a threat to U.S. democracy who routinely employed violent rhetoric and led an attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 election.
Biden said it was a mistake to use the word “bullseye” on a call with Democratic donors last week, when telling them to concentrate on the Republican candidate instead of the fallout from Biden’s poor debate performance.
Many elected officials and fundraisers after the debate wondered if Biden should withdraw from his reelection campaign.
“I meant focus on him,” Biden said of Trump. “Focus on what he’s doing. Focus on his policies.”
The former president survived a shooting on Saturday that killed one person and left two others injured at a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. The gunman was killed at the scene.
Biden said he did not intentionally use violent rhetoric, but did not apologize or back down from his criticisms of Trump as a “threat to democracy.”
“How do you talk about the threat to democracy, which is real, when a president says things like he says?” Biden said.
“I’m not engaged in that rhetoric,” Biden said. “My opponent is engaged in that rhetoric, talking about there will be a bloodbath if he loses.”
He also noted Trump said he would commute the sentences of those convicted for attacking the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, and mocked then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband after he was assaulted by a man with a hammer during a home invasion.
“This doesn’t sound like you’re turning down the heat,” Holt said.
Biden responded that some ideas that Trump champions — continuing to challenge the 2020 election results despite losing in dozens of court cases, demanding a loyalty pledge from Republicans, calling political opponents “vermin” and saying he would be a dictator on day one of a second term — were antithetical to democracy.
Biden focused especially on the Jan. 6 attack, when a mob of Trump supporters sought to stop Congress and Vice President Mike Pence from certifying Biden’s 2020 victory over then-President Trump.
“When you say there’s nothing wrong with going to the Capitol, breaking in, threatening people, a couple cops dying, putting up a noose and gallows for the former vice president, and then you say you’re going to forgive people for that? That you’re going to pardon them?” Biden said.
“Violence is never appropriate,” he said. “Never, never, never, never, never in politics.”
He pledged to “keep talking about the issues” and chastised Holt and the rest of the news media for what he said was a lack of focus on real policy issues.
“Sometime come and talk to me about what we should be talking about, OK? The issues,” Biden said at the close of the roughly 20-minute interview.