Donald Trump on Thursday posted on Truth Social blaming House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries for an assassination attempt that unfolded last month at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, calling him a lunatic and “Low IQ” and saying he “should be charged with INCITING VIOLENCE.” Trump also wrote that “Radical Left Democrats actually want to Destroy our Country.”
The post paired Jeffries’s words with images from the night: a graphic showing him speaking at an April press conference and a still from security-camera footage of the attempted shooting at the Washington Hilton. The move pushed a political fight that began over language into a far more serious register, and it did so on the same day Trump sought to recast a separate act of violence as proof of Democratic rhetoric run wild.
Jeffries said in April, “We are in an era of maximum warfare, everywhere, all the time,” remarks he made in connection with a redistricting battle involving Democratic-led and Republican-led states. He defended those comments at a press conference the following Monday, saying, “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,”
The demand for a charge is a long shot under federal law. A statute makes it a crime to solicit, command, induce or otherwise try to persuade someone to commit a violent crime, but a case against Jeffries would likely fail because prosecutors would have to prove he actually intended a specific crime to happen. The article frames the Washington Hilton shooting as unrelated to Jeffries’s remarks.
The sequence is part of what made the exchange so combustible. Karoline Leavitt told News on the red carpet before the dinner that Trump’s planned speech would be funny and entertaining, then added, “It’ll be funny. It’ll be entertaining. There will be some shots fired tonight in the room,” just minutes before one shot was fired by the alleged gunman and five shots were fired by a Secret Service Uniformed Division officer after Trump sat down for dinner. Leavitt later blamed Jeffries’s comments for the unrelated violence two days after the attempted assassination.
Jeffries snapped back, telling reporters the White House spokesperson should “get lost” and adding, “Clean up your own house before you have anything to say to us about the language that we use.” The fight now has a clear answer: Trump’s accusation is political, but a criminal case against Jeffries would be hard to make, and the comments he is attacking were tied to a redistricting dispute, not the shooting at the Washington Hilton.
