Des Moines, Iowa (CNN) Former Vice President Joe Biden, who was quick to connect Donald Trump's racist rhetoric to the mass shootings in El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio, stopped short of calling the President a white supremacist outright at the Iowa State Fair on Thursday.

"Why are you so hooked on that? You just want me to say the words so I sound like everybody else," Biden told a reporter. "I'm not everybody else -- I'm Joe Biden. I've always been who I am. I'm staying the way I am. He is encouraging white supremacists -- you can determine what that means."

He continued: "It's like everybody wants everybody to call someone a liar. When you say, 'I don't call people liars, I say they don't tell the truth,' you want to hear me say liar so you can put it out and say, 'Biden called someone a liar.' That's not who I am. You've got the wrong guy."

Earlier in the day, when asked the same question about Trump and white supremacy, Biden replied, "I believe everything the President has said and done encourages white supremacy. And I'm not sure there is much of a distinction ... Whether he is or is not a white supremacist, he encourages, everything he does speaks to them. He's afraid to take them on."

Biden's comments at the fair come one day after the former vice president made his sharpest attacks against Trump to date, arguing that he has "fanned the flames of white supremacy in this nation" and "aligned himself with the darkest forces in this nation."

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