CNN’s Jake Tapper did not hide his revulsion Friday at a chilling moment from the Republican convention.
As Sen. Ted Cruz rattled off the names of Democratic politicians, someone in the crowd shouted that one of them “should be shot.”
The shouts rang out Thursday night, the second evening of the Republican midterm convention in Dallas, as the Texas senator warned attendees to take three Democrats at their word. They were New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, Michigan Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed, and Texas Senate candidate James Talarico. An audience member could be heard yelling, “He should be shot!”
Cruz did not react, and it was unclear whether he heard it.
On “The Lead with Jake Tapper,” the anchor played the clip and recoiled.
“Wow,” Tapper said. “That is really, really ugly and awful.”
Corbin Trent, a former communications director for Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), likened the moment to the late Sen. John McCain, who once corrected a supporter who called Barack Obama a Muslim, arguing Cruz should have interjected if he heard the call.
Republican strategist Ashley Davis said she knows Cruz well and doubted he would ever endorse such a line, but called it a symptom of a politics built on riling people up.
“This is the problem with politics in our country right now,” she said.
Tapper added, “I don’t know if he heard it, but if he did hear it and he didn’t say anything, that was the wrong thing to do.”
El-Sayed, one of the targets, was more forceful, telling CNN the shout was “a call for violence that ought to be condemned across the board.” A spokesperson for his Republican opponent, Mike Rogers, said Rogers “condemns those comments — and all political violence.”
The video ricocheted across social media, drawing condemnation and pointed comparisons to the GOP’s own denunciations of political violence.
The threats came the same day many Republicans marked the one-year anniversary of Charlie Kirk’s assassination, and as Cruz warned of communists and Islamists overtaking the Democratic Party.
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