President Biden revealed that his phone call with former President Donald Trump was “very cordial” after the assassination attempt on Saturday.
“I told him how concerned I was and wanted to make sure I knew how he was actually doing,” Biden told NBC’s Lester Holt during an interview on Monday night. “He sounded good. He said he was fine, and he thanked me for calling.”
“I told him he was literally in the prayers of Jill and me, and his whole family was weathering this,” Biden added.
Holt’s wide-ranging interview touched on a number of topics about Biden’s troubled run for president in November and the way that the assassination attempt on Trump at his Pennsylvania rally changed the election.
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But Holt first focused on Biden’s own actions following the news of what had happened: Biden was in Delaware on a planned vacation when the attack happened, and he immediately canceled his plans and returned to the White House to address the nation. He announced within hours that he had spoken with Trump on the phone, which Trump praised his rival for reaching out to him.
“[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.’”
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“No excuse,” Biden reiterated. “Zero.”
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Holt reminded Biden that during a call with Democrats he said that they needed to put Trump “in the bull’s-eye”. Biden immediately clarified that he meant that the party must focus on Trump’s issues and shortcomings, and he regretted using the term, saying “it was a mistake to use” that language.