President Joe Biden says that if former President Donald Trump loses the 2024 election he may attempt to prevent the peaceful transfer of power between presidential administrations.

In the first interview he’s given since announcing he would bow out of the Democratic Party’s nomination process and end his bid for a second term, Biden said that he’s “not confident” the 45th President will let a Harris-Walz ticket take the White House without political violence.

“He means what he says — we don’t take him seriously — he means it,” Biden said. “All the stuff about if we lose there will be a bloodbath, or it’ll have to be a stolen election.”

“You can’t love your country only when you win,” Biden said.

Biden, who bowed out just three short weeks ago after a disastrous debate performance brought questions about his age and fitness from all sides, said that he cleared the way for his Harris’ ascendancy because of the threat he thinks a second Trump term poses to U.S. democracy.

“It’s a great honor being president, but I think I have an obligation to the country to do what I…the most important thing you can do, and that is we must, we must, we must defeat Trump,” Biden said.

Filmed in the White House residence, the brief, multi-cut interview aired this weekend on CBS Sunday Morning.

The president said that his reasoning for stepping aside in 2024 is in line with his reason for running in 2020.

Biden said that he joined the last election after counter-protester Heather Heyer was murdered in 2017 by a far-right rally attendee, and after a march by torch-carrying neo-Nazi activists through Charlottesville, Virginia.

“I spoke to the mom who lost her daughter as a consequence of those neo-Nazis and White supremacists, (who) come out of the fields — in America — with torches, carrying Nazi banners, singing the same sick antisemitic bile that was sung in Germany in the 30s,” he said. “And when her daughter was killed, the press went to the then-President Trump and said ‘what do you think?’ He said there are, ‘very fine people on both sides.’”

According to Biden, that moment demonstrated a shift in what is considered acceptable in the U.S. Where before the Klu Klux Klan wore hoods, he said, in Charlottesville the White supremacists walked openly.

“Under (Trump’s) presidency, they came out of the woods with no hoods, knowing they had an ally. That’s how I read it. They knew they had an ally in the White House. And he stepped up for them,” Biden said.

“I knew then I had to do something, and that’s why I decided to run. Because democracy is literally at stake,” the President told CBS’ Robert Costa.

Defending democracy, Biden said, is also part of what led him to step aside on July 21. Biden said the stakes for the country have never been higher, and that giving Trump a second term would be a grave mistake.

“Look, we’re at an inflection point in world history, we really are. The decisions we make — the last three or four years and the next three or four years — are going to determine what the next six decades look like. And Democracy is the key,” he said.

Trump has pushed back on some of Biden’s assertions.

The former president has said he was talking about the U.S. auto industry’s fate should he lose when he said “if I don’t get elected, it’s going to be a bloodbath, for the whole — that’s going to be the least of it. It’s going to be a bloodbath for the country.”

Trump also, during his debate with Biden, said his comments about “very fine people on both sides” of demonstrations surrounding the removal of a Robert E. Lee statue is a “nonsense story” that “every reasonable anchor has debunked.”

Trump hasn’t push back on all of Biden’s accusations.

“Release the J6 hostages now!” Trump declared in an all-caps Sunday message shared to his Truth Social media platform.

During the 11-minute interview, Biden said another factor in his decision to leave the race was that he had to acknowledge the writing on the wall after the debate. The polls showed a Trump vs. Biden rerun would be too tight a race, and his colleagues in Congress were getting nervous about the public’s perception of his apparently age-diminished ability to take on the 45th president and what that might mean down ballot.

“I was concerned that if I stayed in the race that would be the topic.” he said, when the party’s focus should be on winning in November. “I thought it’d be a real distraction.