On Saturday, following the assassination attempt, President Biden said his call with former President Donald Trump was “very cordial.”
“I told him how concerned I was and wanted to make sure I knew how he was actually doing,” Biden shared with NBC’s Lester Holt. “He sounded good. He said he was fine, and he thanked me for calling,” he continued to say.
“I told him he was literally in the prayers of Jill and me, and his whole family was weathering this,” Biden added.
There was also a time in which Holt discussed Biden’s challenging presidential campaign and how that assassination attempt in Pennsylvania was going to alter the election.
Biden’s response to news of the assassination attempt was to cancel his scheduled trip to Delaware and travel back to the White House to address the nation and call Trump personally.
“[My] first reaction was, oh my God, this is, oh, there’s so much violence now,” Biden told Holt. “I mean, the whole notion that there is this – there’s not place at all for violence in politics in America. None. Zero.”
“We’ve reached the point where it’s become too commonplace, not assassinations, but to talk about, for example, you know, the Jan. 6 attack on the capitol,” Biden continued. “I got in this race early on in 2020 – for the 2020 race. I wasn’t going to run again because I had lost my son. I didn’t feel … and I watched what happened in Charlottesville, Virginia.”
“It was folks coming out of the woods with torches, carrying swastikas, singing the same Nazi bile, accompanied by the Klan,” he added. “A young woman was killed, and I was a bystander, and the president – then president – was asked, what do you think? He said, ‘there are very fine people on both sides.’”
“No excuse,” Biden reiterated. “Zero.”
Holt then told President Biden that he had mentioned to Democratic lawmakers that they have to put Trump in the “bull’s-eye.” Biden responded by saying that he meant that we must focus on Trump’s troubles and devoidesses. In the interview he admitted that the terminology he used was incorrect and shouldn’t ever be said.
