President Donald Trump said Friday that in response to the assassination of Charlie Kirk he would like to see “revenge” manifested at the ballot box.
The president went on the Fox & Friends morning show where he broke the news that law enforcement officials had detained a person suspected of killing Kirk at a speaking engagement at Utah Valley University in Orem.
Co-host Brian Kilmeade asked the president about comments from many on the political right — made before Kirk’s suspected shooter Tyler Robinson was apprehended — that Democrats, the press and left-wing activists caused Kirk’s death.
“You want revenge at the voter box,” Trump said. Trump then proceeded to once again criticize mail-in voting and ballot drop boxes.
“But unfortunately, we don’t have so many ballot boxes because they have mail-in voting, which is totally rigged,” he claimed. “I like ballot boxes where you can, they do mail-in voting all over the place, which is, which is rigged.”
The president has long criticized mail-in voting, going back to the 2020 presidential election, when he falsely accused the proliferation of the practice for “rigging” the presidential election results. But Trump somewhat tempered his criticism of mail-in voting in 2024 given how many Republicans use mail-in voting.
In addition, Trump accused California’s use of mail-in voting and implied that California, where registered Democrats vastly outnumber registered Republicans, is a blue state because of mail-in voting.
“California doesn’t have ballot boxes,” he maintained. “They send out 38 million ballots, nobody knows where they are going and they come back, Democrats get more than Republicans.”
That prompted a response from California Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat who has tangled with Trump.
“An outright lie by the President of the United States,” Newsom said on X.
During the interview, Trump also was asked about how to turn down the temperature as tensions reached a boiling point in the wake of Kirk’s killing.
Co-host Ainsley Earhardt mentioned how some people had cheered about Kirk’s killing and then asked, “How do we fix this country [and] come back together?”
“I’ll tell you something that’s going to get me in trouble, but I couldn’t care less,” Trump said. “The radicals on the right oftentimes are radical because they don’t want to see crime. They don’t want to see crime.”
Kilmeade interrupted and said that right-wing radicals are worried about the U.S.-Mexico border, which led to Trump continuing.
“They’re saying, ‘We don’t want these people coming in, we don’t want you burning our shopping centers, we don’t want you shooting our people in the middle of the street,’” Trump said of the radical right.
“The radicals on the left are the problem, and they’re vicious and they’re horrible, and they’re politically savvy, although they want men and women sports, they want transgender for everyone. They want open borders.”
There is little evidence of any motivaition for Tyler Robinson, the man law enforcement officials suspect of shooting Kirk.
Kirk was a longtme ally of the Trump family and his organization Turning Point USA had become a major draw for Republican politicians as well as a force for driving conservative youth voter turnout.
