Former Vice President Joe Biden has walked back his remarks about beating up President Donald Trump if they were in high school together.
‘I shouldn’t have said what I said,’ Biden said in a Friday interview with the Pod Save America podcast, which is hosted by several former Obama administration officials.
‘I shouldn’t have brought it up again, because I don’t want to get down in the mosh pit with this guy,’ Biden continued.
The interview opened with the hosts asking Biden to pick a name for his speculative brawl with Trump, tossing ideas like ‘The MAGA Saga’, ‘The Donny-Joe Donnybrook’, and ‘Spar-a-Lago’.
WARNING: EXPLICIT LANGUAGE
In this interview on Friday, former Vice President Joe Biden walked back his remarks about beating up President Donald Trump if they were in high school together
Trump said that Biden ‘would go down fast and hard, crying all the way’ in a physical contest
The jokes stemmed from Biden’s remarks on Wednesday at the University of Miami, when he addressed high school students about a tape of Trump’s vulgar 2006 remarks to Billy Bush.
‘A guy who ended up becoming our national leader said, ‘I can grab a woman anywhere and she likes it,” Biden told his young audience.
‘They asked me if I’d like to debate this gentleman, and I said, ‘No.’ I said, ‘If I were in high school, I’d take him behind the gym and beat the hell out of him,” the ex-veep continued, repeating remarks he made in 2016.
Trump clapped back on Twitter the following day, writing: ‘Crazy Joe Biden is trying to act like a tough guy. Actually, he is weak, both mentally and physically, and yet he threatens me, for the second time, with physical assault. He doesn’t know me, but he would go down fast and hard, crying all the way. Don’t threaten people Joe!’
Biden dredged up the remarks at this speech on Wednesday, repeating statements he made in 2016 that if he were in high school he beat up Trump over his remarks about women
Biden was speaking on a podcast hosted by several former Obama administration officials
In the interview on Friday, Biden stressed that he’d been specifically talking about a hypothetical scenario in high school.
‘I said if we were in high school, and he said that in the presence of my sister, I would take him behind the gym,’ Biden said.
‘Now the idea that I would actually get in a physical contest with the President of the United States now, or anybody else, is not what I said,’ Biden said.
Biden went on to say he feared that Trump’s ‘vulgar’ language would ‘encourage the minority element of a male population to think it’s ok to engage in the behavior the president talks about’.
‘Women are entitled to be treated with respect, d**n it,’ Biden said.