Biden: Call to put Trump in ‘bullseye’ was a ‘mistake’

President Joe Biden said his call to put Donald Trump “in a bullseye” days before an assassination attempt on the former president was a “mistake.”

In an interview with NBC News on Monday, Biden said he was only urging Democrats to pay more attention to Trump’s actions.

“I meant focus on him,” he told NBC's Lester Holt in a short clip of the interview posted on social media. “Focus on what he’s doing. Focus on his policies. Focus on the number of lies he told in the debate.”

The sit-down, which is set to air in full later Monday night, comes amid heightened scrutiny of the rhetoric surrounding the presidential race after a gunman shot at Trump during a rally on Saturday, killing one attendee and wounding Trump and two others.

Biden has since urged the nation to lower the temperature, pleading with Americans during an Oval Office address not to let political debate devolve into violence. Biden characterized a call with Trump over the weekend as "cordial," saying he told his opponent he was “in the prayers of Jill and me, and I hope his whole family was weathering this,” according to a second clip of the interview released Monday evening.

But even as he acknowledged that “it was a mistake to use the word” bullseye, Biden rejected suggestions that his own characterization of Trump as a threat to democracy had promoted violence against the GOP nominee.

“How do you talk about the threat to democracy, which is real, when a president says things like he says?” Biden said, pointing to Trump's efforts to overturn the 2020 election and refusal to commit to accepting the results of this year's contest. “Do you just not say anything because it may incite somebody?”

“I’ve not engaged in that rhetoric,” he added, arguing that it was Trump who has principally employed violent rhetoric and made light of other incidents of political violence, such as the attack in 2022 on then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband and the Jan. 6 insurrection.

“I’m not out there making fun of — remember the picture of Donald Trump when Nancy Pelosi’s husband was hit with a hammer, joking about it?” Biden said.

The NBC sit-down is one of three TV interviews the president is doing this week in an attempt to counterprogram the Republican convention and, planned before Saturday’s shooting, respond to worries from fellow Democrats about Biden’s ability to win a second term.

Biden demurred on how the shooting might affect the race, telling Holt that “I don’t know, and you don’t know either.” He added that he’s been more focused in the last couple of days on Trump’s health and the “coverage” that he, Trump and their respective running mates receive, but he did not elaborate.

The Secret Service has since stepped up its protection of Biden and Trump and is now extending a security detail to independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

But Biden did seek to separate his attacks on Trump from the more incendiary rhetoric he portrayed as coming from the right.

“I’ve never seen a circumstance where you ride through certain rural areas of the country, people have big Trump signs saying ‘F Biden’ and a little kid standing there putting up his middle finger,” he said. “That’s the kind of stuff that is just inflammatory, and the kind of viciousness — it’s a very different thing than saying, look I disagree with Trump, the way he takes care of taxes.”