(CNN) Former Vice President Joe Biden said Monday that President Donald Trump's rhetoric assailing immigrants and minorities has emboldened white supremacists and pledged to crack down on assault weapons if elected to the White House.

"This is a president who has said things no other president has said since Andrew Jackson. Nobody's said anything like the things he's saying," Biden told CNN's Anderson Cooper in an exclusive interview, disputing any suggestion that Trump's rhetoric "doesn't contribute to or legitimate or make it more rational" for racists to speak out.

Biden also accused Trump of playing a "dangerous game" with his words, which have, in the former vice president's description, "contributed to, at a minimum, of dumbing down the way in which we as a society talk about one another."

"We've always brought the country together. 'We the people, we hold these truths to be self-evident.' (Trump) flies in the face of all the basic things that we've never really met the standard (of, but) we've never abandoned it before," Biden said. "He looks like he's just flat abandoned the theory that we are one people."

Biden's remarks come amid a storm of newly sharpened criticism directed at Trump after two mass shootings -- in El Paso, Texas, and then Dayton, Ohio -- this weekend. The alleged gunman in Texas, a 21-year-old white supremacist, killed at least 22 people. The Democratic presidential candidates have increasingly drawn a straight line between Trump's past comments and the rise of racist attacks. Federal officials are treating the El Paso shooting as a case of domestic terrorism -- something Biden said should be treated the same way as international terrorism.

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