“You can’t only love the country when you win,” President Joe Biden said in a high-stakes conversation at the White House with NBC Nightly News anchor Lester Holt on Monday.
In a preview of the interview that will air tonight at 9pm ET, Holt asked the president about the language he has used to describe former president Donald Trump – as an “existential threat”, and that “it’s time to put Trump in the bullseye” – and the consequences to the election of the attempted assassination of his opponent, Donald Trump two days ago in Pennsylvania.
“I guess what I was talking about at the time, there was very little focus on Trump’s agenda.” Biden said, “Look, I’m not the guy that said ‘I want to be a dictator on day one.’ I’m not the guy who refused to accept the outcome of the election.”
Biden momentarily conflated the word bullseye and crosshairs, prompting Holt to correct him. Holt pressed the president on whether he had done some “soul searching” about whether his language could “incite people who are not balanced”.
“Look. How do you talk about the threat to democracy, which is real, when the president says things like he says?” Biden responded. “Do you just not say anything because you might incite somebody? Look. I have not engaged in that rhetoric. Now, my opponent has engaged in that rhetoric. He talks about there will be a bloodbath if he loses, talking about how he’s going to forgive all the … actually, I guess suspend the sentence of all that were arrested and sentenced to go jail because of what happened at the Capitol. I’m not out there making fun of … like, remember the picture of Donald Trump when Nancy Pelosi’s husband was hit with a hammer, talking about it? Joking about it?”
Biden’s one-on-one interview – a relative rarity during his time in office – comes amid continuing calls for the president to step away from his re-election run after his weak performance against Trump during a debate on 27 June raised questions about his age and fitness to serve.
Biden’s public appearances have been closely scrutinized since the debate for signs of personal weakness. ABC’s George Stephanopoulos interviewed Biden on 5 July, and asked if he would publish the results of a neurological exam. The president refused. He pointedly displayed a command of foreign policy knowledge at an hour-long press conference at the Nato summit on Friday.
The president has made increasingly forceful rejections of calls to withdraw. But that question had been expected to be at the center of the Holt interview tonight. It slipped in importance behind images of a gunman narrowly missing Trump’s skull at a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, nicking Trump’s ear before being killed by Secret Service sniper fire. One spectator was killed and two others critically injured.
The Republican National Committee opened its national nominating convention this week. Biden’s interview with Holt is a bit of political counter-programming in a moment when all eyes might be expected to be on Trump.
Biden addressed the public Sunday night to call for the temperature of political rhetoric to cool, and said as much again to Holt tonight.
