Critics resurrect TV clip to accuse Kamala Harris of joking about killing Trump: Orders received
Critics resurrected an old TV clip Monday to accuse Veep Kamala Harris of joking about killing Donald Trump or a member of his Cabinet — as authorities probed Sunday’s second assassination try against him.“If you had to be stuck on an elevator with either President Trump, [Vice President] Mike Pence or [Attorney General] Jeff Sessions, who would it be?” TV host Ellen DeGeneres asked Harris in an April 2018 interview.Harris deadpanned back, “Does one of us have to come out alive?” — before breaking into a cackle.The “Ellen” audience members cheered and applauded as Harris continued to laugh with DeGeneres.Harris, now 59, was a US senator representing California at the time.The Trump campaign reposted the footage in the lead-up to the 2020 presidential election, during which Harris was a contender against the former president at one point.“WATCH: Kamala Harris jokes about killing President Trump and Mike Pence,” read the Aug.13, 2020, post on Twitter, now X, which was recirculated months later by Fox News host Sean Hannity.Right-of-center X accounts have now boosted the footage again in the wake of the second assassination attempt against Trump, 78, on Sunday by accused 58-year-old gunman Ryan Wesley Routh.“Kamala Harris openly joked about assassinating President Trump in 2018 as an audience of lobotomized clapping seals cheered,” conservative podcaster Benny Johnson posted on X on Sunday, gaining nearly 4 million views.
“And you’re wondering how we ended up here?”Tom Fitton, the president of the conservative watchdog Judicial Watch, added, “Not funny, then or now.”Club 4 Growth senior analyst Andrew Follett, linking to an X post by Routh in 2024 that echoed Harris’ rhetoric about Trump being a threat to “democracy, wrote, “Orders received.”Accounts had already been sharing the clip intermittently since the first assassination attempt against Trump by shooter Thomas Matthew Crooks, 20, who fired a bullet that nicked the for...