WASHINGTON: President Joe Biden said on Friday he was not confident that November's US election would be peaceful, citing inflammatory comments from Republican challenger Donald Trump, who still rejects his 2020 defeat.
Biden's warning came as lawmakers and analysts expressed concern about increasingly bellicose campaign language ahead of the vote. AFP reported.
Trump, who survived an assassination attempt in July and another apparent plot in September, alleged widespread fraud after his loss to Biden in 2020, and pro-Trump rioters, angered by his false claims, ransacked the Capitol.
“I'm confident it will be free and fair. I don't know if it will be peaceful,” Biden told reporters while discussing the election.
“The things that Trump has said and the things he said last time when he didn't like the outcome of the election were very dangerous.”
Trump was impeached in 2021 for inciting insurrection after hundreds of his supporters, exhorted by the defeated Republican to “fight like hell,” beat police while breaking windows at the Capitol and kicking down doors.
He has been charged with what prosecutors allege was a “private criminal effort” to subvert the election that culminated in violence.
“When all else had failed,” the indictment says, Trump led an “angry mob” to disrupt the certification of the vote.
Trump, who will return this weekend to the site of his first assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania, has long been attacked for his violent rhetoric.
Biden joined the criticism during the first appearance of his presidency in the White House briefing room to tout Democrats' economic achievements as his Vice President Kamala Harris prepares to take on Trump.
Trump was due to campaign Friday in Georgia, a swing state that Biden narrowly claimed four years ago but that Trump won in 2016, and one of the biggest prizes on the 2024 electoral map.
