FBI investigates Thomas Matthew Crooks, shooter at Trump rally

President Biden said his phone call with former President Donald Trump after Saturday’s assassination attempt was “very cordial.”

“I told him how worried I was and wanted to make sure I knew how he was really doing,” Biden said in an interview with NBC’s Lester Holt on Monday night. “He sounded good. He said he was fine and he thanked me for calling.”

“I told him that Jill and I are literally praying for him and that his whole family needs to get through this,” Biden added.

Holt’s wide-ranging interview touched on a number of topics, including Biden’s troubled November campaign and the way the assassination attempt on Trump at his Pennsylvania rally changed the election.

But Holt initially focused on Biden’s own actions after the incidents became known: Biden was on a planned vacation in Delaware at the time of the attack, immediately canceled his plans and returned to the White House to address the nation. Within hours, he announced that he had spoken to Trump on the phone, after which Trump praised his rival for reaching out to him.

“My first reaction was, oh my God, there’s so much violence,” Biden told Holt. “I mean, the whole idea that there’s no place for violence in politics in America at all. None. Zero.”

“We’ve reached the point where it’s become too commonplace to talk not about assassinations, but about, for example, the attack on the Capitol on January 6,” Biden continued. “I got into this race early in 2020 – for the 2020 race. I didn’t want to run again because I had lost my son. I didn’t feel… and I saw what happened in Charlottesville, Virginia.”

“There were people coming out of the woods with torches, wearing swastikas and chanting the same Nazi venom, accompanied by the Klan,” he added. “A young woman was killed, and I was a passerby, and the president — the president at the time — was asked: What do you think? He said: ‘There are very fine people on both sides.'”

“No apology,” Biden repeated. “Zero.”

Peter Aitken of Fox News Digital contributed to this update.