Providing Context for Leavitt’s Examples of ‘Violent Rhetoric’
The annual White House Correspondents’ Association dinner descended into chaos on April 25 when an armed man tried to enter the event in an alleged attempt to assassinate President Donald Trump.
Two days later, at a press briefing, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt called out multiple Democrats in Congress, and the host of a late-night TV show, for “hateful and constant and violent rhetoric directed” at Trump that she said had contributed to another apparent effort to take his life.
Leavitt said: "Just two days prior to the shooting, ABC’s late-night host, Jimmy Kimmel, disgustingly called first lady Melania Trump an expectant widow. Who in their right mind says a wife would be glowing over the potential murder of her beloved husband?"
Later, she went on to cite several “despicable statements” from Democratic lawmakers that she said were "inspiring violence" against the president and other Republicans. As one example, she said, "Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, just this April, this month, said we are in an era of maximum warfare, everywhere, all the time."
Jeffries, the leader of House Democrats, responded forcefully to the criticism in an April 27 press conference, calling Leavitt a “stone-cold liar” and claiming that the Democratic statements she had quoted were “all taken out of context.”
Indeed, Senior Writer D'Angelo Gore and Staff Writer Saranac Spencer reviewed the statements highlighted by Leavitt and found that most -- though not all -- were presented without important context that shows them in a different way than Leavitt presented.
Jeffries was talking about the ongoing back-and-forth between Republicans and Democrats over the redrawing of congressional district lines when he said, "We are in an era of maximum warfare, everywhere, all the time." In fact, the minority leader borrowed that line from an anonymous “person close to the president” who told the New York Times last August that “maximum warfare, everywhere, all the time” was the White House’s redistricting strategy.
Also, the full context suggests that Kimmel was joking about the age difference between Donald and Melania Trump when he said in a segment on his April 23 show that the first lady had "a glow like an expectant widow."
“It was a very light roast joke about the fact that he’s almost 80 and she’s younger than I am. It was not — by any stretch of the definition — a call to assassination," Kimmel later said.
For D'Angelo's and Sara's complete analysis of the quotes, read "Providing Context for Leavitt’s Examples of 'Violent Rhetoric.'"
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