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 former president’s ear.
After both the rally shooting and near-shooting at the Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach, Fla., Harris issued statements condemning violence.
“I have been briefed on reports of gunshots fired near former President Trump and his property in Florida, and I am glad he is safe,” her vice presidential X account posted Sunday. “Violence has no place in America.”
The right-wing X account End Wokeness fired back in a tweet that garnered more than 1 million views, “You called him a threat to democracy and a day 1 dictator. You own this.”
The Post Millenial senior editor Andy Ngo added, “Why would you be glad he’s ‘safe’ when you have repeatedly called him an existential threat to democracy and that he is like Hitler?
“Don’t you want someone like that to be killed?”
Harris also had posted July 14: “As @POTUS said, we must work toward unity as Americans. Assassination attempts have no place in our nation, or anywhere.
“Doug and I pray for the family of the victim who was senselessly killed yesterday and hope for a speedy recovery for those injured.”
Trump wrote on his Truth Social and X accounts Monday afternoon, “The Rhetoric, Lies, as exemplified by the false statements made by Comrade Kamala Harris during the rigged and highly partisan ABC Debate, and all of the ridiculous lawsuits specifically designed to inflict damage on Joe’s, then Kamala’s, Political Opponent, ME, has taken politics in our Country to a whole new level of Hatred, Abuse, and Distrust.”
Routh was arraigned Monday in a Florida federal court on gun charges. He was later taken into custody on a highway.
Crooks was shot and killed by a Secret Service counter-sniper seconds after he began firing on the crowd at the Trump campaign event.
The Harris campaign did not immediately respond to a Post request for comment about her 2018 “Ellen” comments.
