President Joe Biden admitted in an interview Monday that proclaiming it’s “time to put Donald Trump in the bullseye” last week was a “mistake” — but quickly pushed the attention to the former president’s regular use of such violent rhetoric.
Speaking with NBC News’ Lester Holt for a sit-down interview due to air in full on Monday, the president, reflecting on his “bullseye” quote in the aftermath of Saturday’s attempted assassination of Trump at a Pennsylvania rally, maintained that he “didn’t say crosshairs” and that he meant it’s time to start “putting focus on” his political adversary.
“Let’s talk about the conversation this has started, and it’s really about language — what we say out loud and the consequences of those,” Holt pressed Biden at the top of the preview clip. “You called your opponent an existential threat on a call a week ago. You said it’s ‘time to put Trump in the bullseye.’ There’s some dispute about the context, but I think you appreciate that words matter.”
“I didn’t say crosshairs, I was talking about putting focus on,” Biden maintained, shrugging off the notion that his comment had anything to do with the effort to take Trump’s life. “Look, the truth of the matter was, and I guess I was talking about at the time was, there’s very little focus on Trump’s agenda.”
“Yeah, the term was ‘bullseye,’” Holt continued.
“It was a mistake to use the word. I didn’t say ‘crosshairs’ — when I said ‘bullseye,’ I meant focus on him,” Biden said. “Focus on what he’s doing. Focus on his policies, focus on the number of lies that he told in the debate.”
Biden then drew a direct comparison between himself and Trump, arguing that he’s not actually the one inciting violence.
“Look, I’m not the guy that said, ‘I want to be a dictator on Day 1.’ I’m not the guy that refused to accept the outcome of the election. I’m not the guy that said he won’t accept the outcome of this election automatically,” Biden said.
Holt then asked the president if he’d “taken a step back and done a little soul searching on things you may have said that could incite people who are not balanced?” Biden was not convinced that his words incited the violence of Saturday, but he also posed whether or not the possibility of someone being incited to violence should cause him to not speak the truth.
“How do you talk about the threat to democracy, which is real, when a president says things like he says? Do you just not say anything because it may incite somebody?” he said. “Look, I am not engaged in that rhetoric. Now, my opponent is engaged in that rhetoric. He talks about there’ll be a bloodbath if he loses, talking about how he’s going to suspend the sentences of all those who were arrested and sentenced to go to jail because of what happened in the Capitol.”
Watch the full segment, below:
Biden’s interview with Holt is the latest high-profile primetime interview he’s granted to media amid the fallout of support following his dismal debate performance against Trump last month. While he’s completed engagements with ABC and NBC and has a BET special dedicated to the Black vote on Wednesday, his first post-debate outing with George Stephanopoulos did little to move the needle of support. Days after the July 5 interview aired, the ABC journalist was recorded on the street saying that the president is unfit to serve another four years.
