I was casually scrolling through the Washington Post online when I saw a headline that struck me: “Joe Biden talked about beating up Donald Trump – again. The president is not impressed.” Disgusted, I decided to click the link to learn the context surrounding the comments. Needless to say, I was also not impressed.

The remarks were part of a speech Biden gave at the University of Miami for its “It’s On Us” rally against sexual assault. To quote him directly:

“They asked me if I’d 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.’”

Reading this made me sad because I have always thought of the former vice president as an intellectual, compassionate person. And of course, we can’t talk about Biden without mentioning his famous memes. Yet it seems that the person who made these comments about physical assault is completely different from the individual working in the White House until just over a year ago.

I understand that Biden is angry about the fact that Trump said he can “grab a woman anywhere, and she likes it,” in Biden’s words. He has the right to be upset at the fact that the current president has made countless remarks dehumanizing women. But his threat to beat up the president seems rather hypocritical.

If what Trump said and acted upon is so violent and disgusting, aren’t Biden’s words as well?

Yes, there is a difference between physical assault and sexual assault, but they are still both assault. Does it really make sense to use words that explicitly condone one type of assault in order to rail against another type?

After Trump was elected, hate crimes against Muslims increased by 91% in the first half of 2017 as compared to the same time period in 2016. Obviously, his rhetoric affected people who were harboring strong feelings against the religious group and no doubt opened the floodgates for these crimes to take place.

But what does this have to do with Biden’s threat to beat up Trump? The fact that he is openly saying he would want to physically assault him could lead to the opening of more floodgates: people becoming more violent, people bullying each other more – not to mention cyberbullying, as Trump fired back on Twitter (the fact that the president cannot resist responding to every small verbal attack or remotely negative comment about him is its own problem that would need a separate article devoted to it).

Biden is just one person; do his slightly dramatic comments really make that much of a difference in the long term? Actually, yes. Someone, somewhere, who respects or looks up to him, watching that speech on their TV, computer screen – whatever it may be – is going to think “if he can say it and get away with it, then I can do it and get away with it.” And once one person does it, their friend thinks it’s okay, and then their friend thinks it’s okay, and it adds up.

It’s even more disturbing to consider that Biden was addressing college students when he made these comments – impressionable, young people (and future leaders) who should be receiving a message more mature than “this guy said the most disgusting thing, so I would beat him up for it.”

To be completely clear, this is not at all a defense of Trump or his words. It’s a plea to politicians to consider the impact of their words and a plea to citizens to critically consider those words before simply saying “He’s a Democrat/Republican and so am I, so I agree with what he said and think it is completely right.” Maybe then our political climate could become ever so slightly less polarized.