Bull’s-eye: Biden needs to take responsibility for his inflammatory rhetoric contributing to the attempted attack on Trump

President Biden, during his latest rambling, incoherent, bad-tempered, and often excruciatingly awkward TV interview, was very clear about one thing regarding Donald Trump’s shooting: don’t blame me, pal!

In fact, he looked indignant that the interviewer, NBC’s Lester Holt, would even suggest such a terrible thing.

It was extraordinarily insightful to watch Biden working so hard to deflect any attention for his own culpability in raising the political temperature to such scarily dangerous levels that someone would try to assassinate his rival five months before the election.

When asked what his first reaction was to the shooting, Biden instantly went on his favourite Trump-bashing greatest hits rant about January 6, Charlottesville, Nazis, both sides etc.

Think about that for a moment.

Here is the President of the United States declining to even pretend to care that his immediate predecessor, and current rival for the forthcoming election, just came within an inch of being killed.

No, what was more important to ‘Mr Nice Guy’ Biden was that he score instant political points to infer that Trump had it coming.

To his credit, Holt was having none of it, and pointed out that just days before the shooting, Biden declared Trump an ‘existential threat’ to America and told donors: ‘It’s time to put Trump in the bull’s-eye.’

But even when confronted with his use of such obviously violent language, Biden raced to avoid any responsibility for his shameful rhetoric.

‘I didn’t say crosshairs!’ he exclaimed, as if that made any tangible difference.

They mean the same thing when used about human beings: making someone a target.

Biden then launched into another anti-Trump diatribe until Holt interjected to say: ‘But have you taken a step back and done a little soul searching on things that you may have said that could incite people who are not balanced?’

It was a very pertinent question to which Biden should have responded by saying, ‘Yes, I have. I regret the more inflammatory language that I, and other Democrats, have used about Donald Trump, and we must all, on both sides, dial it down to have more civilised political debate going forward.’

That would have been the correct, and respectful thing to say given the gravity of what happened on Saturday night.

Not least when your side has spent eight years screaming that Trump is the new Adolf Hitler whose Nazi regime murdered 12 million people including six million Jews in the Holocaust, and incessantly, and hysterically, branded him a ‘fascist’ and ‘dictator’ and ‘tyrant’ and just about every other ludicrously exaggerated, and offensive label they can hurl at him.

If you call someone that kind of thing often enough, and repeatedly state that they represent a clear and present danger to the country, then eventually someone is going to act on it.

We don’t yet know the shooter’s motives, but we do know he wanted Trump dead.

And we also know that many so-called tolerant left-wingers on social media disgustingly expressed their dismay that he wasn’t successful, or insisted the shooting was staged.

When it comes to Trump, all liberal rhetorical bets have been off for a long time which is ironic given the biggest problem most of his critics on the left have with him is his own incendiary rhetorical language and the way he speaks about people.

Not that they would ever admit they’re part of the problem.

In response to Holt’s ‘soul-searching’ question, Biden just went on the attack against Trump again, even justifying the violent words he used about him while simultaneously denying he ever said them.

‘How do you talk about the threat to democracy, which is real, when a president says things like he says?’ he raged. ‘Do you just not say anything ’cause it may incite somebody? I have not engaged in that rhetoric…my opponent has engaged in that rhetoric.’

Yes, you bloody have engaged in it, Mr President.

Endlessly.

How dare you try to pretend you haven’t.

As fork-tongued Biden ranted, yet again, about January 6, and then about how Trump – disgracefully – mocked Nancy Pelosi’s husband when he was hit with a hammer by an intruder, Holt intervened, again, to say what we were all thinking: ‘This doesn’t sound like you’re turning down the heat, though?’

Entirely unsurprisingly, this merely promoted Biden to go off once more at Trump for election-denial and packing the Supreme Court with conservative judges etc.

Honestly, it was pathetic to watch.

As was the rest of the interview, which just confirmed what the debate debacle established – that Biden is now so cognitively impaired, he cannot possibly serve another four years in office.

But nor should he be allowed to evade accountability for his role in inflaming tensions.

The Democrats announced they were suspending a hateful $50 million advertising campaign attacking Trump, following the assassination attempt.

But it won’t be long before they’re back calling him a despotic Hitler-esque monster who must be stopped, because they can’t help themselves, and Biden will be leading the charge because that’s the only way he knows how to compete against him.

If the President really wants to dial down the temperature, he should start by admitting his own appalling contribution to it, and properly atone for the damage it’s done.