President Joe Biden was slammed Tuesday after he suggested former President Donald Trump should be “locked up” during a campaign stop in Concord, New Hampshire.
“I know this sounds bizarre. It sounds like if I said this five years ago, you’d lock me up. We got to lock him up,” Biden said at a Democratic campaign office.
After a four-second pause filled with loud applause, he quipped, “politically lock him up — lock him out, that’s what we’ve got to do.”
The comments drew sharp criticism from legal experts and the Trump campaign.
CNN legal analyst Elliot Williams called it “profoundly stupid,” arguing it reinforced Trump’s claims about political persecution.
“It played directly into the central point that Donald Trump and folks around him have made, which is that the country has this overweening Justice Department top-down from the president going after its rivals,” Williams said.
Trump campaign spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt quickly responded as well.
“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,” Leavitt said.
Former Biden press secretary Kendra Barkoff defended the president by comparing it with Trump’s rhetoric.
Vice President Kamala Harris typically deflects when supporters chant “Lock him up!” at rallies, and claimed the courts — most of whom are in Democratic-controlled states — will decide such matters.
Trump faces multiple criminal indictments, including 34 felony convictions in Manhattan related to hush money payments. His sentencing in that case is scheduled for November 26, three weeks after the election.