US president Joe Biden and former US president Donald Trump.
Credit: Reuters Photos
Concord: President Joe Biden said Tuesday that former President Donald Trump was a threat to democracy and should be locked up, before quickly amending his comment to say he meant locked up “politically.”
Biden was speaking at a local Democratic campaign office in Concord, New Hampshire, when he appeared to slip by suggesting he wanted his predecessor put behind bars. While Trump as a candidate and president has regularly used such language about his opponents, Biden typically refrains from that kind of talk to avoid fueling Republicans’ claims that he is prosecuting his adversary.
“We got to lock him up,” Biden said at the campaign office, where he dropped by after a speech on health care elsewhere in Concord.
Seeming to catch himself, he quickly added: “Politically lock him up. Lock him out. That’s what we have to do.”
Biden was making an argument he has for years about Trump’s lack of commitment to the Constitution. “Our democracy is at stake,” he said. “Think about it. Think about what would happen if Donald Trump wins this election.”
Trump’s campaign quickly seized on the comment as proof of his contention that the various prosecutions against him were simply partisan persecution.
“Joe Biden just admitted the truth: He and Kamala’s plan all along has been to politically persecute their opponent President Trump because they can’t beat him fair and square,” Karoline Leavitt, a campaign spokesperson, said in a statement. “The Harris-Biden admin is the real threat to democracy. We call on Kamala Harris to condemn Joe Biden’s disgraceful remark.”
Trump’s outrage at the notion of political prosecutions is selective. Running in 2016, he encouraged crowds that chanted, “Lock her up,” about his opponent, Hillary Clinton. While in office, he regularly badgered his attorneys general both publicly and privately to prosecute Clinton, Biden, former President Barack Obama, former Secretary of State John Kerry and other Democrats, as well as former FBI officials who had investigated him.
During this year’s campaign, Trump has regularly said he would prosecute those who have angered him if he got back to the White House.
Trump has suggested that a general who in his view crossed him deserved the death penalty. He has circulated a post saying that former Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., should face a military tribunal for her part in a congressional investigation into his attempt to overturn the 2020 election leading to the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.
Just last week, he suggested he would order the National Guard or active-duty military members to round up U.S. citizens who oppose his candidacy.
Trump has been indicted four times and convicted of 34 felonies in one of the cases by a jury in New York. There is no known evidence of Biden or his White House staff personally playing a role in any of the prosecutions against Trump.
Two of the indictments were lodged by Jack Smith, a federal special counsel appointed by Attorney General Merrick Garland under rules meant to insulate the process from politics. The other two were brought by local prosecutors in New York and Georgia, both of them elected Democrats but not under the control of the Justice Department or Biden.
Biden made his comments Tuesday as part of an extended and somewhat disjointed riff about the consequences of Trump’s possible return to power and his desire to go after enemies and the so-called deep state if he wins.
Biden referred to the recent Supreme Court decision granting Trump and other presidents substantial immunity from prosecution for official acts. At one point during the court process, Trump’s lawyers acknowledged that under their constitutional interpretation, a president who ordered the Navy’s SEAL Team 6 to assassinate a domestic political rival would not be subject to criminal prosecution.
“This is a guy,” Biden said, “who also wants to replace every civil servant, every single one; thinks he has a right under the Supreme Court ruling on immunity to be able, if need be, if it was the case, to actually eliminate — physically eliminate, shoot, kill — someone who is, he believes would be a threat to him. I mean, so, I know this sounds bizarre. It sounds like — I said this five years ago: You’d lock me up. We got to lock him up.”
At that point the crowd applauded before Biden revised his remarks to say he meant “politically lock him up.”