Biden: I would only fight Trump in high school

Former Vice President Joe Biden is correcting the record on his threat to fight President Trump.

“I was talking about high school,” Biden told NBC reporter Mariana Atencio on Friday. 

Atencio asked Biden whether he would “really fight the president” following an exchange between Trump and Biden that began when Biden criticized Trump’s past remarks about women at a Florida rally on Wednesday. 

Biden declared then that he would have taken Trump “behind the gym and beat the hell out of him” in high school.

{mosads}

Trump responded in a tweet early Thursday, calling Biden weak “both mentally and physically” while declaring his potential 2020 opponent “would go down fast and hard” if such a confrontation occurred.

Biden demurred when asked to respond to the president’s tweet but stopped to insist he was only talking about a hypothetical situation in high school, not the present day.

“Go back and read what I said. I said ‘high school,'” Biden stopped to tell Atencio, who caught him live on MSNBC while walking down a hall in the Capitol.

During his Thursday remarks at a Florida rally, Biden was referencing comments made by Trump on a 2005 “Access Hollywood” tape that included lewd remarks around grabbing women without their consent.

“A guy who ended up becoming our national leader said, ‘I can grab a woman anywhere and she likes it.’ They asked me would I like to debate this gentleman, and I said no. I said, ‘If we were in high school, I’d take him behind the gym and beat the hell out of him,’” Biden said to cheers.

Trump responded on Twitter the following morning.

“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,” Trump wrote. “He doesn’t know me, but he would go down fast and hard, crying all the way. Don’t threaten people Joe!”

Trump is 71 and Biden is 76.

Trump and Biden similarly clashed ahead of the 2016 presidential election.