President Donald Trump on Thursday fired off a raging social media post blaming House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries for the assassination attempt against him at last month’s White House Correspondents’ Dinner and demanding that he face criminal charges.
Writing on Truth Social, Trump called Jeffries a “lunatic” and “Low IQ“ and said he “should be charged with INCITING VIOLENCE” while claiming that “Radical Left Democrats actually want to Destroy our Country.”
Trump’s comments accompanied a graphic showing Jeffries speaking at an April press conference when he called for “maximum warfare” relating to Democratic-led states’ work to counter GOP redistricting next to a still image from security camera footage of the attempted shooting at the Washington Hilton.
Jeffries, leader of the Democratic caucus in the House of Representatives, made those comments during a press conference in the wake of Virginia’s special election to approve a new congressional district map that heavily favored Democrats. State legislators had put forward the new map to counter Republican-led states’ efforts to rig the upcoming midterm elections in their favor by eliminating seats held by Democrats in majority-minority areas.
At the time, Jeffries said: “We are in an era of maximum warfare, everywhere, all the time.”
Three days later, a gunman attempted to storm the DC Hilton ballroom where Trump was attending the annual fundraising dinner for the first time in his six years as president.
Although a federal statute does make it a crime to “solicit, command, induce, or otherwise endeavor to persuade” another person to engage in a crime of violence, it’s unlikely that any attempt to charge Jeffries under that law would succeed because the law requires the government to prove that the person charged actually intended for a specific crime to occur.
Jeffries defended his remarks at a press conference the following Monday, telling reporters: “As it relates to the comment related to ‘maximum warfare, everywhere, all the time,’ in connection with the redistricting battle that Republicans launched, I stand by it,”
Trump’s latest call for a high-profile Democratic official to be prosecuted for ordinary political rhetoric appears to ignore comments by his own White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, just minutes before the shooting.
During an interview with Fox News on the Red Carpet as she arrived for the dinner, Leavitt told the right-wing network that Trump’s planned speech would be lighthearted and joke-laden.
“It’ll be funny. It’ll be entertaining. There will be some shots fired tonight in the room,” she said.
Though her comment was a clear reference to the long tradition of the president roasting the White House press corps at the annual dinner, they took on a more chilling light when actual shots were fired — one from the alleged gunman and five from a Secret Service Uniformed Division officer — just minutes after Trump sat down for dinner that evening.
Leavitt ignored her own comments and lashed out at Jeffries directly at a press briefing two days after the attempted assassination by blaming the Democratic leader’s comments for the unrelated act of violence.
Asked to respond, Jeffries told reporters that the White House spokesperson should “get lost.”
“Clean up your own house before you have anything to say to us about the language that we use,” he said.
