Former President Donald Trump and his supporters have long asserted that the multiple criminal indictments against him are politically motivated and intended to imprison him to keep him out of the White House for a second term.

Democrats and their media allies have insistently denied that claim, but President Joe Biden just gave the game away on Tuesday when he openly declared of his partisan rival Trump, "We gotta lock him up," according to Fox News.

Biden quickly clarified himself to say he meant "politically" locked up, but that only further confirmed the now overt partisan motivations of the ongoing efforts to try, convict, and imprison the Republican nominee.

Biden said the quiet part out loud

President Joe Biden was in Concord, New Hampshire on Tuesday for an event promoting lower costs for prescription drugs, after which he visited the New Hampshire Democratic Party's campaign headquarters and spoke to a gathering of candidates and campaign workers about the imminent election in just two weeks.

While riffing on what a terrible and dangerous person former President Trump is, as he often does, Biden again accused his former opponent of being a threat to democracy who must be prevented from winning a second term in office at all costs, and said at one point, "Our democracy is at stake. Think about it. Think about what would happen if Donald Trump wins this election."

"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 of Trump to great applause from the crowd of Democrats he was addressing.

Perhaps realizing the significance of his gaffe, the outgoing elderly president added a few seconds later, "Politically lock him up. Lock him out. That's what we have to do."

Trump campaign's rapid response

The New York Post reported that President Biden's people tried to clean up his verbal slip and suggested that he didn't really mean that former President Trump should be incarcerated, but the damage had already been done and the remarks went viral on social media, with the Trump campaign wasting little time with a response.

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," Trump campaign spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt said in a statement.

"The Harris-Biden Admin is the real threat to democracy. We call on Kamala Harris to condemn Joe Biden’s disgraceful remark," she added.

Can no longer distance themselves from the prosecutorial efforts

The Post noted that President Biden, for the most part, has tried to distance himself from his own Justice Department's ongoing criminal prosecutions of his former opponent, though he has on numerous occasions mocked and taunted Trump over his mounting legal troubles.

Likewise, Vice President Kamala Harris has similarly sought to avoid appearing as though she is involved with or supportive of her administration's efforts to imprison the former president and typically quips something to the effect of "let the courts handle it" when her supporters chant "lock him up" at campaign rallies.

However, given Biden's remark about locking Trump up and the Trump campaign demanding Harris denounce the statement, it will be difficult for either of them to continue acting as though that isn't a prioritized desire for them.