But Biden’s presidential campaign had refrained from weighing in until shortly after Trump touched down in the United States on Tuesday afternoon.

“The President’s comments are beneath the dignity of the office,” Kate Bedingfield, Biden’s deputy campaign manager, said in a statement issued moments after Marine One landed on the South Lawn of the White House. “To be on foreign soil, on Memorial Day, and to side repeatedly with a murderous dictator against a fellow American and former Vice President speaks for itself.”

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Bedingfield added that Trump’s actions are “part of a pattern of embracing autocrats at the expense of our institutions — whether taking [Russian President Vladimir] Putin’s word at face value in Helsinki or exchanging ‘love letters’ with Kim Jong Un.”

Trump campaign spokesman Tim Murtaugh responded by saying it was “rich” of the Biden campaign to criticize Trump, considering that Biden had “bashed” the president while on foreign soil at the Munich Security Conference this year.

“If you want an example of ‘siding with a murderous dictator,’ how about the disastrous Iran nuclear deal?” Murtaugh said in a statement. “Or failing to follow through on the ‘red line’ with Syria? From the Iraq war to the Russia reset, Joe Biden has been wrong on virtually every foreign policy call in the last four decades. Just ask former Obama Defense Secretary Robert Gates.”

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Gates wrote in his memoir that Biden has “been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades,” although he recently told CBS’s Margaret Brennan that he and the former vice president “agreed on some key issues” during the Obama administration.

Trump weighed in with a tweet Tuesday evening.

“I was actually sticking up for Sleepy Joe Biden while on foreign soil,” Trump claimed. “Kim Jong Un called him a ‘low IQ idiot,’ and many other things, whereas I related the quote of Chairman Kim as a much softer ‘low IQ individual.’ Who could possibly be upset with that?”

North Korea’s state-run news agency had called Biden “a fool of low IQ.” The insult was a response to Biden’s statement at a campaign rally that Trump embraces “dictators and tyrants like Putin and Kim Jong Un.”

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During a joint news conference with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe on Monday, Trump attributed the North Korean media statement about Biden’s “low IQ” to Kim.

“He probably is, based on his record,” Trump said of Biden. “I think I agree with [Kim] on that.”

Among those criticizing Trump for his comments was Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.), a military veteran who sits on the House Foreign Affairs Committee. Kinzinger cited the Memorial Day holiday in taking issue with Trump’s message.

“It’s Memorial Day Weekend and you’re taking a shot at Biden while praising a dictator,” Kinzinger tweeted Sunday. “This is just plain wrong.”

A Biden campaign official said Tuesday that the campaign held off on sending out a statement earlier in response to Trump’s remarks because the vice president “is committed to respecting the sacred purpose of Memorial Day.”